Denton, Corker, Marshall: Melbourne Museum, Australia
Project type
Denton Corker Marshall opened in Melbourne in 1972; it now has offices in Sydney, Canberra, Hong Kong, Djakarta, London and Warsaw and has become one of the most important architectural practices in Australia. The Melbourne Museum is situated in a large park with a formal layout, sharing this magnificent garden setting with the Royal Exhibition Building constructed in 1880. When DCM won the museum competition in 1994, many feared that their forty-metre-high blade might obstruct the view of the neoclassical dome.
The museum refers to the axial and volumetric composition of the Royal Exhibition Building, establishing a balance with the older building.
The airborne blades, cubes and pyramids in a dynamic arrangement, the bright colours and the structural grid have no roots in monolithic museum architecture derived from the classical temples of Schinkel's culture.
The static, symmetrical expression of this type of building reflects the concept of finite knowledge, while the museum's function is to house marvellous collections, to be numbered and classified.
This traditional concept of the museum's role and architectural type persisted throughout most of the twentieth century, but in the last thirty years museums have been going through a crisis all over the world. To attract the attention of the public, museums needed to confront the interests of commercial industry, and in the process, the museum has become a place to spend leisure time and enjoy interactive educational experiences. All these changes have influenced the set-up of the Melbourne Museum, with its vast collections and important local artefacts recording social and natural history. The museum contains an aboriginal cultural centre, a section dedicated to the rainforest and an aviary, all underneath the big jutting blade. The museum also incorporates a children's museum, a place for special exhibitions, a cinema and advanced research and restoration facilities. DCM's response to the complexity of the programme is a group of museums arranged in rings along a linear backbone for circulation through the entire site. From the formal point of view, individual buildings are held together by the structural grid: the campus model is reminiscent of the small museums built on the river banks in Frankfurt and is a product of the architects' great interest in urban planning.
Their specific interest is construction of the urban environment; in this case, the concept guiding the project was positioning the multiple elements that make up the museum along an inner road and designing the campus like a small town.
The simplicity of this model responds to the basic need to make the institution's complexity and breadth legible to visitors. Denton, Corker and Marshall apply their usual method, first setting up a system and then breaking the rules. Their first move is to set up the grid, reflecting the real grid structure of the city of Melbourne, inside which the various functional nuclei of the museum are positioned as transgressive volumetric objects. The prefabricated cement containers making up the two main exhibition spaces are represented as "black boxes", recessive and orthogonal, inserted in the system to contrast with the brightly coloured dynamic volumes erupting out of the grid.
The levels occupied by the curators' offices, laboratories and the large library are the heart of the museum's research work. These spaces, visible behind a continuous glass façade, are set up above the levels open to the public, extending from east to west along the entire length of the building. The management offices are positioned at the tip of the blade, overlooking a large raised courtyard oriented along the axis of the Royal Exhibition Building. The two constructions are surrounded by a sunny square isolated from the crowds. The museum's northern side provides contrast with the glass wall to the south in the form of a large wall: tall, narrow windows cut into its volume allow visitors to look down into the laboratories on the underground level. The architects have adapted sculptural forms and spaces to the constraints dictated by the building's context and functional programme. Their aim was to generate a set of casual elements: within the constraints of the project, the unexpected may occur, and this element of surprise is exactly what the architects are aiming for.
Floriana De Rosa
Link: http://www.dcm-group.com/
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