Is our new ‘museum’ brilliant, bonkers or just a big box? |
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When the Powerhouse Parramatta opens next year, it won’t just be the largest museum in NSW. It will be the first real test of a $1.3 billion-plus cultural experiment, a decade in the making.
The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences – founded in the spirit of the European Enlightenment and the 19th-century fairs of design, technology and science – is about to remake itself in a new, purpose-built home in one of Australia’s most populous and fast-growing regions.
Construction giant Lendlease has begun the phased handover of the Moreau Kusunoki-designed building’s two main exhibition halls, as chief executive Lisa Havilah locks in a rotating schedule of massive, immersive, temporary blockbuster shows.
The Powerhouse is due to open its doors in Parramatta next year.Credit: Rory Gardiner with Colby Vexler
Under Havilah, the new Powerhouse is primed for the TikTok generation, for audiences who may have felt excluded from traditional institutions, and for multicultural communities largely absent from the museum’s collection.
In these respects, Havilah sits at the vanguard of a cohort of cultural leaders rejecting the “neutral temple of expertise” model in favour of self-aware museums that foreground multiple perspectives and points of view.
The Art Gallery of NSW, Australian Museum and National Gallery of Australia have all flirted with these postmodern ideas – from Mike Hewson’s Tank Gallery playground to Lego-built exhibitions – but none occupy a building designed expressly to “upend the hierarchy of the museum”, as Havilah puts it.
Critics argue that she has abandoned the museum’s core business and legislated core purpose in pursuit of “shallow entertainments”, dismissing the Powerhouse as “Carriageworks west”, the multi-arts centre she once led.
Powerhouse chief executive Lisa Havilah tours the construction site in October.Credit: Janie Barrett
Many of the controversies plaguing the Powerhouse – allegations of overspending, the marginalisation of curatorial and conservation teams – at least partly stem from this core battle and the political decisions that reshaped the museum’s future.
Parramatta will become the Powerhouse’s fourth home in 150 years. The original Garden Palace museum burned down in 1882. And in the early 1980s, the Wran government relocated the institution to the repurposed Ultimo Power Station.
In 2014, then NSW premier Mike Baird dropped a bombshell: he planned to relocate the Powerhouse to a parking lot on the Parramatta River to deliver western Sydney its first dedicated cultural institution. The announcement sparked protests, several inquiries, and policy backflips. Labor ultimately inherited the project, pledging to complete the Parramatta build and committing to an Ultimo renovation. The combined price tag now tops $1.4 billion.
Public Service Association members protest at the Ultimo museum in early 2024.Credit: Louie Douvis
The new Parramatta headquarters – dubbed the milk crate by locals – will offer column-free spaces for five opening exhibitions, the largest of these the size of an aircraft hangar. “Not a church, not a cathedral but a basilica,” Powerhouse chairman David Borger says.
It will also house a demonstration kitchen, a 55-seat cinema, retractable theatre seating for 600, bunk accommodation for school groups, and a rooftop garden with greenhouses and telescopes. Several spaces will be available for commercial hire, including product launches, conventions and keynote addresses.
“What I like about the place is that it has been designed with artists and audiences in mind,” says Alex Poots, director of New York’s The Shed, an early inspiration for the Powerhouse and leader of community engagement and “democratic” programming. “It feels impressive, but it doesn’t feel ominous. It doesn’t feel like this place isn’t for me because it’s got........