For millenia fire and flood have shaped this landscape. Bundanon’s buildings and landscapes are designed for resilience and resistance, incorporating radical solutions to a changing climate with a net zero energy target and defendable against fire and flood. Two years ago fire tore through the adjacent forest, then flooding followed months later. So the building and landscape design approach was necessarily driven by resilience, resistance and ecological repair.

Gifted to the Australian people by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd, Bundanon’s purpose is to foster an appreciation and understanding of art and environment. The new works enable expanded programming towards this and open up this extraordinary place and its $46.5M collection to the public with an art museum of national significance. Developed as a rich ensemble of distinct periods in Bundanon’s evolution, the new site wide works are equal parts subtle and dramatic, preserving and transforming. Defendable against fire and flood, the Art Museum, embedded in the landscape, is resistant to fire. By contrast The Bridge for creative learning is resilient, and allows flood waters to flow through it unimpeded.

The Art Museum, with Collection Store, is resistant to fire. It is subterranean. Precious artworks are housed and exhibited in an underground building, which protects the works from diverse climate conditions and offers thermal stability in the form of the reinstated hill (which also maintains the setting for the Boyd Education Centre by Murcutt, Lewin and Lark), reducing the demand on mechanical systems.

By contrast the Bridge is resilient. Treated as flood infrastructure the architecture supports rather than impedes the overland flow and sporadic floodwaters below it. A 165-metre-long by a 9-metre-wide structure that at one end abuts the Art Museum within the sloping hillside, bridges the reinstated wet gully and accommodates 32 bedrooms, breezeways, creative learning, dining spaces and a public cafe.

This response also engenders an appreciation for climate and its vicissitudes. The thermal stability of the subterranean museum, the feeling of coolth from being within the hill is counterpointed by being on The Bridge which, in the spirit of Boyd’s practice of painting en plein air, is where climate variation is central to visitor experience.

The concept both preserves and transforms, renown aspects of the current setting especially around the Boyd Education Centre are maintained while an array of new and compelling visitor experiences enabled. The multi-disciplinary approach to the site masterplan embeds a major shift in thinking about significant landscapes: from a purely picturesque to an ecological one that takes account of the natural and extended environmental systems at its heart.