+ Berndt Museum on Carpark 3 ₂₀₁₇

Room 1.06 - Team: Felix Joensson, Jason Macarlino, Hillary Loh, Judd Harris

This is the winning entry from an Ideas Competition held by the University of Western Australia in collaboration with the Berndt Museum. The museum holds one of the most significant collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural material in the world, manifesting in art, objects, archives, manuscripts, film and sound and photographic collections. The collection is currently stored in a basement and is not freely accessible to the public. The competition called for schemes to address this and provide a dedicated museum and research facilities that offer a new experience in the Western Australian context.

We acknowledge that the new Berndt museum is proposed on Wadjuk Boodja near the Derbarl Yerrigan, and respect the significance of the river Noongar People.

We understand the importance of delivering effective and meaningful consultation with Noongar community in delivering such a project. We respect the interrelation of the waterway with traditional culture, trade, and livelihood of Noongar people, and the responsibility we have to acknowledge these aspects within the design; including upkeep of the water and natural environment. We pay our respect to Traditional Owners of this land, their ancestors and Elders past and present, on whose lands we live, work and travel.

The strategy to elongate the New Berndt Museum along the southern edge of carpark 3 emphasises the existing urban and riverine qualities of the site. The physical separation of the major components of the program from the ground allows for a continuation of the courtyard sequences of the adjacent law buildings. Geometries were derived from the extension of sight lines that cross the campus and are carried into the detailing of the soffit and the undulating ground plane. [The soffit alludes to the biomimicry of the fresh water turtle’s body and shell physiology. As the turtle was used medicinally by Noongar people, the form also symbolises longevity and the preservation of artwork and culture.]

This public plaza underneath our building allows free access for loading, and sets up a series of choreographed vertical connections.

The volume that hovers into the adjacent courtyard, houses the lobby on the first floor which is accessed by a large stair. This stair will take the visitor up only one level which, open to public access, is both a temporary exhibition and education space. [The eastern ‘kart’ (head) of the exhibition space densifies knowledge, offering opportunities to learn about pre-colonial activities in battle, ceremony, and trade interactions at the site. Homage to a hot spring which existed at the current UWA site is made in the lobby stair, representing the geothermal processes that cause rising of water from under the earth. The adaptive temporary exhibition on both the first and second floor is intended to be used as a market place to promote entrepreneurial activity for Indigenous artists.]

The temporary exhibition is connected by a walkway that runs from the Reid Library ground level, providing a public thoroughfare. *[The path towards the river from the tail of the museum allows walkers to view the rising and dropping movements of the Waugal during creation, while the undulations represent the carving out of the landscape left behind.]

From here another stair, suspended next to a large void, allows a visitor to move upward into the second and third floor exhibition spaces. The collection is stored in the central volume above the lobby. Objects come in, are processed and then are moved either west into the research wing or east into the exhibition spaces. The top level of this volume holds the restricted access section which orients itself directly to the river.

The scholar’s residence has been separated from the museum and placed on the Tuart House site next to other university accommodations. The proposed residences provide temporary accommodation and establish a link between the museum, Gooninup, Kings Park and the Derbal Yerrigan. [A diversity of Aboriginal Peoples may stay at the accommodation, and will vary in their engagement with traditional practice and values. Multiple accommodation units permit physical separation of Elders and youth or men and women when appropriate, and gives privacy for yarning and experiencing the spirituality of Noongar Boodja.]

The sculpted silhouette of our proposal is a response to the surrounding hipped roof forms of the university context offering a dynamic interpretation of the vernacular forms. Motifs and openings on the facade are derived from abstracted ripples on the river, superimposed with the regular geometries of the surrounding romantic modernist buildings. Materiality is also derived from this context – off form concrete that utilises a darker pigment resetting the colonial legacy of the limestone as an institution building material.