Moreau Kusunoki designed the new Powerhouse Parramatta with the mission of calling the museum paradigm into question and conceiving a platform with limitless potential that evolves over time and through its users. Placing public space at the heart of our conception, the proposal creates a coherent and resilient architecture, whose beauty derives from the capacity to meet the needs and desires of the user.
The museum’s efficiently compact built form treads lightly on the site, creating a porous civic ground and a generous new waterside park cradled by the soft curve of the adjoining Parramatta River. The River is the soul of the Precinct, and the Powerhouse its caring guardian; its slow and incessant flow past the museum stands as a permanent reminder to the passage of time, the ephemerality of the present moment, and the resilience of things in their right place. The core of the new Powerhouse is composed of seven large presentation spaces: flexible boxes that act as social and cultural condensers. Taking these seven spaces – each has its own distinctive form and programme, ready for extended uses in the future – we derived the shape of the building through the fundamental act of stacking. Together with engineer Jun Sato, we developed the concept of ‘lattice3’ for the structural exoskeleton – a system of intricate lattices that are wrapped around the spaces of the museum and support their dynamic programming, providing total interior freedom. Through the dissolution of the structure into a fine, efficient three-layered lattice, we conceived an envelope that transcends scale in order to exist simultaneously as both intimate and iconic, becoming the museum’s most recognisable design element.
Between the seven presentation spaces and the exoskeleton, we wove in a continuous layer of all-capable interstitial space that have malleable, open-ended uses. The potential of the interstitial spaces gives way for life and meaning to evolve and to naturally appear in between the defined spaces, while events and interactions arise ‘through the cracks’, thereby organically enhancing the impact of the project. They offer a quiet place for reflection, a lively place for interaction, a safe, neutral space for meetings and the creation of new shared memories.
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