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Inspiration for the Parramatta Powerhouse comes from famous landmarks including the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Eiffel Tower.
By Julie Power
Principal of Genton architecture firm Steven Toia.Credit:James Brickwood
Architect Steven Toia stopped under the Sydney Harbour Bridge to marvel at its engineering, the time and labour involved and the beauty of the deceptively light and lacy trellises that span its arches.
The trellises’ moody shadows and ability to carry six times the load of a conventional building inspired Toia and the French and Japanese architects designing the new $915 million Powerhouse Parramatta to make the structure the star of the show.
To do so, they turned the building inside out.
At Parramatta, an exoskeleton of structural lattice will support a superstructure of vertical, flexible hyper-platforms. This means the 30,000 square metre museum, now under construction, will be strong enough to hang a squadron of planes.
Its largest exhibition space has a door big enough for a modern-day barnstormer like the late Henry Goya Henry – who flew through a barn with the doors open, and under telegraph poles – to land a plane (a small one).
A famous scofflaw and pilot, Goya Henry was the first to fly (and illegally) under the Harbour Bridge in 1936. His plane, the Jolly Roger, a Genairco VH-UOG aeroplane made in Australia and decorated with the skull and crossbones, was purchased for $125,000 by the Powerhouse in 2007 and has yet to be put on display.
Putting the structure on show was about “science and art coming together”, said Toia, a principal with Genton, the Australian firm that partnered with the French and Japanese architects Nicolas Moreau and Hiroko Kusunoki to win the design competition in 2019.
With its foundations nearly completed, some pieces of the massive steel structure that will be used in the ground floor are already in storage in Wollongong, Infrastructure NSW head of projects Tom Gellibrand said.
Depending on weather, builder Lendlease expects to start assembling the steelwork on site like a supersized Meccano set in the next few weeks.
The system is modular, so the pieces will be slotted into place in plain view of the public.
Some steel trusses span 42 metres, and the largest individual piece is nearly half the length of an Olympic swimming pool, said Gellibrand.
“I think it’s going to be quite exciting (and rapid) to see,” said Toia.
Compared with the Harbour Bridge, which took 1400 workers, 6 million rivets and eight years to build, the two wings of the Parramatta Powerhouse, with their 18,000 square metres of gallery space, are expected to be completed by late 2024.
The Harbour Bridge’s steel lattice was created with rivets. In contrast, the latticework at Parramatta has been created using plasma machines that cut the trellis design into the high-grade steel plate.
An artist’s render of the $915 million campus for the Powerhouse Museum, due to open in Parramatta in 2025. The Powerhouse will also give its Ultimo home a $500 million overhaul. It has set a $125 million private fundraising target for the two projects combined.Credit:Moreau Kusunoki and Genton
This uses significantly less steel without compromising its strength.
The exterior latticework, about 700 millimetres from the building’s glass walls, made the building transparent, and encouraged visitors to look out and the public to look in, said Toia. It changes size, going from the monumental at its base to the human as it rises.
Much of the steelwork was prefabricated overseas, coated in fireproof and rust-resistant white paint and designed to last, so it doesn’t require the non-stop painting of the Harbour Bridge made famous by comedian Paul Hogan.
To minimise the risk of delays that occurred during COVID, Lendlease, which won the $502.8 million building contract, has disaggregated supply by sourcing components from suppliers around the world and Australia, including those near the site.
Toia said the museum’s brief necessitated a design that allowed for flexible programming, a long design life of 100 years, and column-free spaces.
The architects and engineers see the shifting shadows of the trellis as an ever-changing artwork.
To develop the concept, Toia, Moreau and Kusunoki worked with Jun Sato, a structural engineer famous for looking to nature for inspiration, and engineers from Arup.
Sato likened the effect of the shadows of the trellis in the new museum – which will fall across the glass – to being outdoors in a forest. “When sunlight comes through trees we feel comfortable,” he said.
The largest of the seven exhibition spaces, called Presentation Space One, is a column-free space 55 metres long, 39. 5 metres wide and 18.5 metres high.
To provide for large community events, the full length of this room opens on to the public area overlooking the river, said Toia.
Chief executive of the Powerhouse Museum Lisa Havilah said the exoskeleton meant “incredible spaces inside the Powerhouse are completely column-free”.
“They’re epic in scale,” she said. They would give the museum the ability to create “incredible immersive exhibitions”, take international blockbusters and showcase the collection.
‘It was this concept of lattice, lattice and more layers of lattice.’
The use of lattice on the Harbour Bridge was raised at the very first presentation by the architects, said Havilah.
“It was this concept of lattice, lattice and more layers of lattice. What they wanted to do was be economical, in terms of the use of that structure to make it feel light, but also make it engineered, so it can absolutely hold the building up.”
Havilah said one thing central to the design brief was to create a museum where the structure was on show.
“So it’s not a museum of surfaces. It’s a museum of steel and concrete and glass. And so its form is true to what it does.”
Before they finalised the design, Toia, Moreau and Kusunoki spent days touring Sydney and Parramatta and getting to know the collection.
The two firms had a lot in common. Both are young – Genton was founded in 2010, Moreau Kusunoki in 2011. Both won prestigious prizes, Genton winning the Prix Versailles for its design of Reservoir railway station in Victoria.
The “Jolly Roger”, a Genairco biplane made by the General Aircraft Company in Mascot in 1930.Credit:Powerhouse Museum collection
The French-Japanese duo was also asked to design a Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki that didn’t end up happening. They also have ties to some of Japan’s most influential architects, including SANAA, the architects behind the new wing of the Art Gallery of NSW.
Moreau Kusunoki has landed most of its work through international competitions, which the architects say offers a rare opportunity to ‘dream’ in a more shielded context. “It helps us break out of our own cliches,” they said.
Since Toia, Moreau and Kusunoki won the design competition in 2019, the proposal to build a museum in Parramatta – on the banks of a river prone to flooding – has copped a beating. The design was a milk crate, said Herald art critic John McDonald, and the museum was more like an entertainment centre and mall than a museum, said a parliamentary inquiry.
There were other influences as well as the Harbour Bridge, said Toia. They were the 1880s wrought-iron-lattice Eiffel Tower in Paris – decried as a “tragic street lamp” before it was built – and the Powerhouse’s very first museum in the glass-and-iron-framed Garden Palace that was located in today’s Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney.
An old photo of the Garden Palace that burned to the ground on September 22, 1882. It housed the first Powerhouse Museum. Credit:
Built to house an international exhibition, the Garden Palace faced similar objections to those levied at Parramatta over the past five years.
It was too expensive, costing £250,000, and it had problems with water (too little, compared with criticism of locating a new museum next to a river that floods). Nobody could agree on its focus: whether it should be rural in nature or house the latest in industrial and manufacturing from around the world.
In the same way as critics attacked the Powerhouse’s move to Parramatta, and the subsequent decision to retain the old museum at Ultimo and build a new one to serve Sydney’s west, the Herald asked, why build a garden palace when the town hall hadn’t yet been completed?
In 1878 the Herald wrote: “We objected to this thing initially but it has gone too far … We must take a favouring tide on the flow.”
The palace survived only three years, burning to ashes at dawn in September 1882, destroying priceless items. A few survive in today’s Powerhouse collection.
The Parramatta project’s lead structural engineer, Kengo Takamatsu from Arup, said the benefit of the lattice structure in the exoskeleton was resilience and strength. “Even if a structural component is damaged or removed, the load can be redistributed very efficiently,” said Takamatsu, who worked on the project for three years.
“It also performs over and above standard load requirements – the Powerhouse Parramatta exoskeleton structures carry six times the load supported by columns in a conventional commercial building with the same number of storeys.”
Takamatsu, who studied engineering and architecture in Japan, said the structural challenge required looking beyond thick walls and columns, harnessing the capability of an exoskeleton structure to be strong enough to bear the very heavy loads of a multistorey long-span building.
“In addition, the structure must be able to survive a once-in-a-2500-year chance of earthquake or extreme wind speeds to ensure structural integrity for a 100-year design life.”
In the final plan at Parramatta the architects have located the two wings of the new museum away from the river, also providing more public space, where it is elevated above the flood risk zone.
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