Australia’s Museum Powerhouse

Abstract

Exhibit Reviews AUSTRALIA’S MUSEUM POWERHOUSE WADE CHAMBERS AND RACHEL FAGGETTER There is nothing like walking into a major new museum for the first time. The impact of strong visual images and unusual sounds and the movement and voice of the crowd produce a special excitement. In the greatest museums this sense of anticipation owes much to ele­ ments of architecture and design. By these standards, Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum must rank with the best. Launched in 1988, the bicentennial of European settlement in Australia, the Powerhouse Museum functions as a “vast showcase” for one of the world’s great metropolitan collections in the material culture of science and technology.1 Led by Lindsay Sharp, an Oxfordtrained historian of science, the new museum was transformed in less than ten years from a dilapidated and largely forgotten relic and reliquary of antipodean science into one of the nation’s leading cultural institutions. The remarkable scale of this achievement is reflected in the size of the public access area (a nearly tenfold increase to over 200,000 square feet), the budget (“54 million and not a penny more” ruled the premier of New South Wales), the number of objects (perhaps 10,000, about 3 percent of the collection, on display) and exhibits (twenty-five identifiable spaces flowing easily together), the size of staff (340 with 37 curators), and the annual number of visitors (around 2 million). Most impressive of all is the conversion of the former Ultimo Powerhouse and Tram Depot into a major project of the imagination. The Powerhouse stands alongside the Darling Harbour urban redeDr . Chambers is associate professor in science and technology studies at Deakin University and a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of a series of textbooks on the perception and interpretation of nature. Ms. FAGCETrER is lecturer in environmental and heritage interpretation in museum studies at Deakin University. She was founding director of two Australian museums: the National Wool Museum and the Melbourne Children’s Museum. 'The Powerhouse is the newest and by far the largest exhibition venue of the 112-year-old Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.© 1992 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/92/3303-0005$01.00 548 Australia’s Museum Powerhouse 549 Fig. 1.—The Powerhouse Museum at Sydney’s Darling Harbour, formerly the Ultimo Powerhouse and Tram Depot. (Photos courtesy of the Trustees, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.) velopment precinct,2 a landscape reminiscent of Montreal’s Expo ’67 or the Baltimore Harbor scheme, complete with sailing ship, aquar­ ium, maritime museum, Chinese garden, and convention and enter­ tainment centers. Sydney, Australia’s major tourist destination and home to 3.5 million people, has in the postwar era mounted a considerable challenge to Melbourne’s hitherto preeminent position as cultural capital of the nation. The architectural transformation of the disused tram powerhouse has produced an aesthetically satisfying, even spectacular, combination of old and new structures. Like the Musée d’Orsay or La Villette in Paris, like Pei’s East Wing of Washing­ ton’s National Gallery of Art, or Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, with all ofwhich the visual statement of the Powerhouse might interestingly be compared, the new museum is, first ofall, a heroic structure. Its public and political success is to a significant degree architecturally driven, its internal exhibition spaces architecturally constrained. (See figs. 1, 2.) 2A historically appropriate reference, since in 1827 New South Wales Governor Darling administered the first official allocation (£200 a year) toward the formation of a public museum. See Clem Lloyd and Peter Sekuless, Australia’s National Collections (Sydney, 1980), p. 136. 550 Wade Chambers and Rachel Faggetter Fig. 2.—The Powerhouse Museum buildings opened in 1988, a combination of old and new structures displaying Australia’s material culture heritage. The size and complexity of the refit offered major challenges of visitor access and circulation, not all of them successfully resolved.3 Some halls are enormous (figs 3, 4), allowing display of very large objects, such as the Catalina flying boat (Frigate Bird 2) suspended in the old Boiler House along with several smaller planes. At one end...