 | MELBOURNE MUSEUM Denton Corker Marshall skilfully negotiate the complexities of the contemporary museum.
Text by Paul Walker. Photography by John Gollings.
| Review |
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View from Nicholson Street.
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The Milarri Garden, with the Forest Gallery blade
beyond.
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The broad entry plaza mediates between the scale of the city and that of the museum.
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The transparent principal entry facade.
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The neo-constructivist elements of the museum’s
southern aspect.
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View from the western edge of the Carlton Gardens. The colourful tilted cube of the Children’s Museum is to the left, with the Children’s Garden in the foreground.
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Cafe courtyard.
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Aerial view, showing the museum’s location in the Carlton Gardens and its relation to the towers of the Melbourne CBD.
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The museum from the south side of the gardens. The central blade, on the museum’s north-south axis, shelters the Forest Gallery.
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Approach from Nicholson Street.
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Looking along the upper circulation gallery, to the eastern end. Janet Laurence’s installation, Stilled Lives, is in the foreground.
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The main public promenade and suspended blue whale skeleton.
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The exhibition Te Vainui O Pasifika in the Te Pasifika Gallery.
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Entrance foyer with Patsy, a 1929 ’couta boat.
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Wurreka by Judy Watson, in the entry to the Kalaya
Meeting Place.
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Looking through a “black box” exhibition space to Te Pasifika.
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Interior of the Kalaya Meeting Place, part of Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Centre.
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Museums are not what they were. While they have become much more exciting
places to visit – architectural bravura has played a large part in this – the raison
d’etre for their massive collections and their display and conservation traditions has
become less and less apparent. They face ethical dilemmas over what these collections
are for and what they represent. And even over who really owns them. At the same
time, the role of the museum beyond collecting and conserving has become diffuse.
Museum research in “natural history” and ethnology was long ago overtaken by
universities, and the institution’s traditional commitment to public education looks likely
to be replaced with infotainment as it responds to pressures to demonstrate relevance
– by getting as many people through the doors as possible. The concept of amenity
and education as public investments has been usurped by a reduced view of these
things as private goods.
It has been hard, in these circumstances, for the old urban dialogue between distinct
public and commercial architectures to continue. This dialogue once defined the
symbolic realm of the central city. Major urban interventions of recent years in
Melbourne, at least, have blurred these differences, just as the territorial specificity of
the central area is blurred in the ongoing CBD expansions south of the Yarra and those
planned west of Spencer Street.
Denton Corker Marshall’s design for the new Melbourne Museum responds to these
issues of institutional purpose and public profile – and turns them to strategic
significance. In some regards spectacularly. The building re-asserts a role for public
architecture in distinguishing the central city, for example. It clearly enjoys a site which
makes this possible, on the slightly elevated rim that half encircles central Melbourne
on its northern and eastern flanks and then runs down William Street. This rim, as the
architects realised, links the site to that of the courts, Melbourne University, the
hospitals on Victoria Parade, and the State Parliament and Treasury buildings – other
places of strong, if now compromised, public significance. The old Exhibition Buildings
(now in the museum’s care) used this locational advantage. Their dome, as historian
Paul Fox points out, answered several other domes on public buildings in Melbourne
elevated by topography or by tower (Architecture Australia, June 1990). The long front
wall of the museum building in effect forms a city wall to reinforce the older
architectural marking of the place. It makes a new northern boundary for the extended
CBD beyond the Hoddle grid.
The slight elevation of the museum site and the depth of space across Carlton
Gardens to Victoria Parade have offered an opportunity to look back from this wall to the
city, seen principally as the eastern cluster of downtown commercial towers. The large
museum plaza – too big to serve only as a forecourt – mediates between the urban
scale and that of the building. The sense of the city as spectacle is further emphasised
by the two roof blades that hover above the facade, diagonally framing the Exhibition
Buildings opposite and the views to either side. It is as if the largest artefact in the
museum collection is not so much the Exhibition Buildings as the city itself. A third
blade is lined up along the museum’s principal north-south axis. Tilted more
dramatically, it is apparent, not from the city side but from the back, even visible several
kilometres away along the Eastern Freeway’s approach to the central city.
The Melbourne Museum addresses the urban issues raised by its site and the
typological history of the public institutional building. It also confronts internal
institutional problems now faced by museums – the role of research for instance. On
the day of the new building’s public opening, a short article appeared in The Age about
the Melbourne Museum’s request for an increase in its operational grant which had
been declined by the Victorian Government. The comments by a staff union representative that the money was needed to stop further reductions in the museum’s
research efforts were probably read by few of the thousands drawn by free
performances and by publicity pumped out by the same newspaper (a major sponsor).
Architecture cannot solve the problem of research in the museum. But DCM’s design
has, at least, been acutely aware of it. Research is rhetorically privileged in the place.
Two big, sulphur yellow elongated boxes, housing a large part of the research
collections, hang over the length of the main public circulation volume within the
building, one either side of the centrally placed public entry. Offices for researchers and
curators are lined up in rows in front of these storage boxes, with their glazed front
walls just behind the glazed principal facade of the building. From the front, research
and curatorship are somehow – if remotely – on display. It looks as if they count. But
this arrangement is also a very practical one: the object and the agent of inquiry are
placed immediately beside each other.
More important perhaps than the little flourish of idealism in the location and
visibility of research accommodation is the careful orchestration, in the museum’s
public areas, of circulation and exhibition, and the relation of exhibition zones to each
other. Circulation areas are used in a limited way for display, especially for a few large
iconic objects – a blue whale skeleton on the main public promenade, a ’couta boat
complete with unfurled sail in the high slice of space at the front of the building.
A fantastic installation by artist Janet Laurence using specimen bird and animal skins,
shells and minerals from the museum’s reserve collections currently occupies two
vitrines in the upper level circulation spine. But in general the public areas of the
building do not integrate circulation and exhibition into a single entity. Such integration
was the strategy of many nineteenth century museums with natural history and
ethnography collections – they often followed a putative evolutionary line in their spatial
organisation of exhibitions. It is also a strategy that is increasingly used in contemporary
institutions with an overweaning intention to tell a single determinate story with
artefacts and architecture.
It is perhaps a pity that more attention to possible narrative (mis)readings was not
given by DCM to their Melbourne Museum design. An unintentional relationship
between infancy and indigeneity could be inferred, for example, in location of the
children’s museum at one end of the complex and the Aboriginal centre, Bunjilaka, at
the other. The curvy elements in the ceilings, walls, and walkways of the latter seem to
imply a banal correlation of aboriginality and “natural” forms.
But generally the fragmentation, dispersal, and almost random connections between
the various exhibitions galleries that unfold off the main spine seem about right. It has
also facilitated break-out spaces to combat museum-fatigue, not only in the distinct
circulation areas, but also in pockets of outdoor space – balconies, enclosed gardens,
roof terraces – that the architects have captured here and there.
The galleries are generally of two kinds. Some are large “black box” spaces. In these
the exhibition experience is fundamentally determined not by the architecture but by
contrived (and in my view patronising and overly didactic) installations of artefacts,
display materials, and information. A set from “Neighbours” – found in the Australian
gallery – is not worth seeing outside a soap opera milieu this museum is not equipped
to present. The architects are blameless in such choices of what to show. Indeed the
best things in the black box galleries are the beautifully crafted display cases designed
by DCM to give some order within all the visual and aural chaos. Museums currently
think people like this mess. But when I visited, many other visitors were enjoying the
decontextualised and ordered things in Janet Laurence’s vitrines. Some of the galleries
will offer this kind of experience on a grander scale. A lofty white space currently contains an exhibition of canoes from the Pacific with minimal interpretative clutter.
Another similar gallery – for dinosaurs – will open soon.
The fragmentation of the galleries allows the museum to try different strategies for
different kinds of audiences, and to revise one exhibition without revising them all. This
is important when the agenda of such institutions, no longer self evident, is subject to
ongoing change. In this regard, the most problematic of the exhibition volumes is the
Forest Gallery, the legacy of a previous museum director with experience in wild-life
sanctuaries. It has anomalously installed a fragment of Victoria’s “natural” environment
under the blade roof right at the centre of the building. Its trees and pools will be
populated with birds, fish, snakes, insects. But DCM has even extracted some
advantage out of this curiosity. Mesh walls and a steep blade outside the visitor’s angle
of vision enable transparency to be extended right though the middle of the building
from the glassy screens of the northern facade.
All of this is part of the neo-constructivist approach that DCM have become known
for. Whatever we might think of this style, it is deployed in the design of the Melbourne
Museum to make an instrument carefully honed to the site’s urban potential and to the
contingencies that all museums currently face. It remains to be seen whether this
instrument will be played as well as it deserves.
Dr Paul Walker is a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne.
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| Architect's Statement |
Museums Victoria presents the Great Hall and the new
Melbourne Museum as a complementary pair. The museum is
the dominant partner, bringing the buildings and gardens
together as a “visually interdependent whole”, clearly linked to
the city as one of its major institutions. But it will be an
institution like no other – a building which opens up to reveal
in a simple way the fascination and complexity of its purpose to
all who visit. It is be confident and mature, elegant and
visionary; a key Melbourne building for the next
100 years.
The museum plan uses a campus mode: an arrangement of
varied elements grouped together beneath a formal volumetric
framework that constitutes a reference to the formality of the site
and even evokes a sense of the Hoddle grid – a Melbourne icon.
At 70,000 square metres, the museum is a much bigger
complex than the Great Hall, but it takes scale references from
the hall. The Great Hall establishes scale by detailed
embellishment within a monumental form; the museum by
articulated volumes within a detailed frame. Its elevated
central “Gallery of Life” contributes to its status as a
complementary building in the Carlton Gardens with power
and strength of its own.
The enveloping grid framework is a significant element
of the design. Its formal qualities allow the complex and
varied elements with the “campus” to read as individual
components; separate elements, or example, the research centre,
the Imax theatre, or the Aboriginal centre, have greater
individuality than would be possible or appropriate without the
ordering frame.
It is a building that is also a collection of buildings, where
the landscape interpenetrates the forms and where garden and
open activity space interact. It subtly lays claim to a powerful
presence by its very interaction with the landscape; the gardens
themselves become inclusive to its form. It is not a forbidden
and impenetrable institution entered through closed doors.
Denton Corker Marshall.
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| Project Credits |
Melbourne Museum
Architect Denton Corker Marshall.
Landscape Architect Denton Corker Marshall.
Structural Engineer Ove Arup and Partners.
Services Engineer Lincolne Scott Australia.
Certification Peter Luzinat and Associates. Client
Victorian Government Office of Major Projects on
behalf of Museums Victoria.
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