Powerhouse Parramatta, the new museum in western Sydney, opens on Saturday. The $915 million project, dubbed the “Opera House of western Sydney”, will be presented to the public with five new exhibitions and a 23-day opening festival.
The building is distinguished by a white lattice exoskeleton composed of 1,300 individual parts, which wraps around 30,000 square metres of interior space. The steel exoskeleton encloses two towers and is constructed from 12,000 tonnes of steel. The museum boasts massive column-free exhibition spaces up to 18 metres high, including the largest such space in Australia. Designed by Moreau Kusunoki and Genton, the interior walls are covered in a gentle, textured layer made from 600,000 crushed oyster shells, sourced locally and sustainably.
This branch of the museum was announced in 2014, but the project has been accompanied by vocal opposition from some former employees and board members. They expressed concern that the main site in Ultimo was being neglected in favour of the new infrastructure project, claiming the museum was moving away from its core activities towards contemporary art and events. The $915 million price tag was also under scrutiny, and an investigation by the New South Wales Auditor-General into allegations regarding management and procurement practices has concluded. In late August, 10 weeks before the planned opening, chief executive Lisa Havilah was removed from her position while the investigation was ongoing.
Despite the controversies, the museum opens with a rich programme. The opening festival offers performances, entertainment, talks, screenings and workshops, with 65 per cent of the programme free. The five exhibitions include a tribute to space and flight, a celebration of the shopping centre, a children’s exhibition thematically linked to darkness, and a presentation of British designer Es Devlin. Among the highlights is a reconstruction of a fountain from the historic Roselands shopping centre, a restored 1920s lift that transports visitors with accessibility needs between exhibition floors, and a rainbow-coloured walk-in installation by American light artist James Turrella atop the tower.
The spaces contain more than 1,600 museum objects from a collection of 500,000 items, accompanied by approximately the same number of loaned exhibits. The central opening exhibition is Task Eternal, located in the main hall of 2,000 square metres with 18-metre-high ceilings. It is the only opening exhibition for which adults pay an admission fee – $30, or $20 for students and pensioners, while entry is free for those aged 16 and under. The exhibition gathers objects from the Powerhouse collection, loans, commissions and literary texts, including excerpts by American science fiction writer Ted Chiang. His story Tower of Babylon inspired the structure of the exhibition, including a zig-zag tower through which visitors ascend and descend. Among the key exhibits are delicate sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, a boomerang collected from Burramatte/Parramatta in the early 19th century, and a “boilerplate” (test model) of the Apollo command module from the 1960s.
