Kari

ARCHITECTURE AND I

I have been interested in architecture ever since I was a young child. I drew up floor plans of my room and created corridors and smaller rooms on my own floorplan. I kept one of the first floorplans I did when I was seven years old. It was for a artist house that had a pottery kiln underneath.

I loved living in what can only be called as Brisbane's first urban planned area, Inala. It was a poor suburb of Brisbane, and it had a notorious stigma that even today still conjures up memories of how good of a time I had there.

As I moved across Queensland, I noticed that people chose to live where they did by two means. They either grew up there, or they moved there from else where. But further from this, they sometimes didn't have the opportunity to move elsewhere. This is where I got interested in town planning and decided to start it in 1992 at QUT.

I did fairly well at it, the theory that is, reading up on people like Christopher Alexander and Le Corbusier (architects), Jane Jacobs (not a Town Planner).

My great failing was that I felt that planning, is essentially social engineering, such as engineering is for buildings, some thought (I believe) that to be a dangerous thought to hold.

Perhaps, I entered Town Planning as a naive person, expecting things to happen for me, instead life just kept plodding along, and I stopped studying and took up a job at Huson & Associates, as a personal assistant, where I computed third octave frequencies and created noise models in autocad to be used in ENM (Environmental Noise Model) to create noise dB maps. I really enjoyed the work, it was really useful.

Where do I go from here? I was thinking. In the time from where I currently work as a CTO, but, I've worked as a Architectural detailer, Bakers Labourer, Real Estate Consultant and chairman of an Art Gallery.

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