The Eva and Marc Besen Centre creates a dedicated place for gathering, events and learning within the TarraWarra Museum Estate. The Centre is compactly arranged in two gently curving bands. The western band contains the multi-purpose learning area, entry reception and staff offices; the eastern band, the open collection store and back-of-house areas including loading dock and storage. An insulated glass wall separates the archive from the learning and reception areas, ensuring that optimal climate control is maintained within the ‘open store.’ This allows visitors in these areas to see into the collection, engage with it, and enjoy it. Effectively the back-of-house experience is now front-of-house.

The estate comprises a significant architectural legacy left by Allan Powell (TarraWarra Museum of Art) and Graeme Gunn’s winery for TarraWarra Estate, as well as KTA’s 2016 Cellar Door project. The new Centre integrates this suite of buildings and forms a companion building secondary to the main event, Powell’s Museum. Designed to complement rather than compete with the museum, The Centre heightens the drama of Powell’s architecture and enhances the arrival experience. Located to the east of the Museum it presents as an understated building that integrates with the landscape. The subterranean Centre has reinstated the rooftop-accessible carpark, with its primary façade facing the Sculpture Walk. It is fully glazed to showcase interior activities and is distinguished by a woven metal mesh veil. This reduces sunlight to the interior and visually dissolves the building establishing it as a soft counterpoint to the mass, weight and opacity of Powell’s rammed earth wall to the west. A large cylinder element leads visitors from the upper carpark down a spiral stair to the entry area. A vertical counterpoint to the horizontal building lines, and inversion of the glass drum of Powell’s museum. At the northern end, lifting out from the building’s base, the veil blurs the building’s edge and which in its fuzziness adds a further layer to the remarkable and unfolding valley landscape vista.

Wurundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung woman Stacie Piper was the First Nations curator at TWMA during the design phases. She was involved in design decision-making in an embedded capacity, and facilitated early and ongoing engagement with Wurundjeri elder Joy Murphy Wandin about the building design. Craig Murphy-Wandin collaborated with Oculus on the horticultural strategy and hand carved the boulder that sits under the water spout giving visibility to ‘Slow moving water’ that is translation of the local Woiwurrung word ‘tarrawarra’.