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New Victoria - new Melbourne Museum in Australia - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, August, 2001 by Karen Jacobsen

Melbourne Museum houses major civic collections and is a dramatic statement about the city and its culture.

The two biggest cities in Australia are not very far apart, but they could be in different countries. Sydney is laid back, lounging relaxed in the sun round its marvellous romantic harbour, where bush still sometimes meets the sea as it did before the whites arrived, and where the undistinguished commercial towers of the CBD aspire to picturesque grandeur on the hilly Georgian plan. Colder Melbourne seems much less Californian; it is primly European and uptight on a dreary flat site firmly ordered by a nineteenth-century grid, with the tower blocks contained in the blocks. But there is another side to Melbourne's culture: a tradition of rebellion against Victorian stuffiness - what Rory Spence has called the 'cult of larrikinism' (AR December 1985, p63), a wildness which at its most extreme produced the Irish bushranger hero, Ned Kelly, and today still permeates much of the city's best architecture and painting, with a larky yet edgy ethos.

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Now, larrikinism has become established. The Denton Corker Marshall firm is perhaps the most successful in the city (depending on how you measure such things). But in their best work, they have never lost exuberance, and the new Melbourne Museum is an example (out of many) which shows how wildness can become part of the official expression of the city and the State of Victoria. The site is an important one, very much part of the nineteenth-century city. To the south is the long Beaux-Arts Royal Exhibition Building, put up in 1880 as one of the biggest structures in Australia, and hallowed as the meeting place of the first federal parliament in 1901. To the north of the site is a park, the jardin anglais of Carlton Gardens.

The architects, who won the competition in 1994, decided to reflect on (but not repeat) the Royal Exhibition Building. The museum is parallel to it, running east-west, and its entrance is on axis with that of its neighbour, so that approach on ceremonial occasions is a progression from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. But usually people get there completely differently. On the south side of the new building are two huge canopies of perforated aluminium which stretch out welcomingly but powerfully to the streets to east and west. These almost translucent metal planes slope down towards the entrance, drawing you to the middle of the building. They are supported by a rhythmic steel exoskeleton, which the architects claim is symbolic of the grid of the city. In fact, it provides a rigorous three-dimensional cage that orders the whole composition.

The programme was very diverse, with several different collections brought together in one complex, almost as if, say the architects, the small disparate museums which line the bank of the Main in central Frankfurt (AR June 1990 and passim) had been brought together in one complex. Most of the special collections and functions have been given particular expression, so the steel cage sometimes seems to house a rather quarrelsome menagerie, some members of which are trying to escape while others almost come to blows or huffily turn their backs on each other. From the south-facing front, all this drama is muted.

A long flat glass elevation is terminated by the irregular skewed shapes of the MAX theatre to the west and the box of the temporary exhibition gallery in the east. Behind the glass, offices, laboratories and conference rooms look south (away from the sun) over a new piazza towards the nineteenth-century pomposity of the exhibition building. For the public, a generous tall foyer leads to two parallel internal streets running east-west. The southern one gives access to IMAX, cafeteria, schools centre and so on. The northern one, which you get to after acquiring a ticket, is a top-lit double-height gallery that gives access to all the different collections; the skeleton of a whale provides appropriately scaled decoration. On the gallery's north side are the main elements, with in the centre, an astonishing glass house, the Gallery of Life, containing living native plants and birds. On each side of it are huge imperforate boxes for exhibitions on, for instance, science and nature.

At both ends of the long gallery, you are inflected northwards towards special collections: to the west, the children's gallery, and to the east, the aboriginal cultural centre. These are some of the creatures that are trying to escape from the cage. Children are in a toppling cube emphasized by a chequered pattern of strong colours. Aboriginal culture is celebrated in a wonky composition, in which rusted steel is supposed to recall the bark structures of indigenous peoples. Some critics have suggested that the shapes and materials trivialize and make concrete the essentially ephemeral nature of aboriginal sacred structures, and that the location of the collection far off to the right of the main action is an impertinent comment on the first human cultures of the continent. But few will criticize the grand timber-lined ramp that coils inside. From the park side, children and aborigines are relatively quiet ends to a composition of jostling dissimilar shapes housing special galleries and a cafe. The whole is d ominated by the almost unbelievable northward upward thrust of the cantilevered Gallery of Life roof, which soars out over the park in a move which both dominates and embraces nineteenth-century artificial nature, while containing an idealization of the natural world that seems right for our own time. The gesture is paradoxical, up-front, pushy yet thoughtful -- very Melbourne.

New Victoria - new Melbourne Museum in Australia - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, August, 2001 by Karen Jacobsen

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