Open House WKND

Ahoy there!

Yesterday I had a lovely day exploring some great gems of Melbourne as part of the Melbourne Open House weekend.  Basically, there are about 75 buildings (many of which are private, or generally out-of-bounds) open to the public for free this weekend.  Unfortunately, this event has proven to be so popular among architecture/design/history/Melbourne enthusiasts that many of the buildings saw queues that were longer than an anaconda.  For instance, one of the places I wanted to see most, the Russel Place Substation, had a 90 minute queue to get in.

Lyons office space

We managed to squeeze in a number of visits in our afternoon of exploration.  The Lyons architecture firm, housed in the former Foy & Gibson department store (think old-school David Jones) on Bourke St was a unique and memorable office space.  There was a maze of large silver tubes lining the ceiling and parts of the floor and pillars were uneven and rocky.  Interestingly, the firm decided not to design its office space itself, but rather, outsourced the design to another architecture firm.

Lyons

Participating Buildings

I'm very jealous of Origin Energy employees.  We visited their hangout space on the rooftop of their building on Flinders Lane.  It's decked out in astroturf and wooden furniture.  There's also an unusual cylindrical seating area that was amusing to sit in.

Origin Energy Rooftop Garden

Quite a few weeks back I visited some old friends in Sydney.  It was cold and rainy all weekend, but we still managed to get up to some fun things, like viewing the Archibald prize finalists at the NSW Art Gallery and frolicking about in Nadia's backyard.

Nadia's backyard

Walk towards the NSW Art Gallery