The National Museum of Australia in Canberra celebrates the land, nation and people of Australia by exploring the key issues, events and people that have shaped Australia. Ashton Raggatt McDougall designed the National Museum of Australia and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in March 2001. This museum is an ambitious commentary on aspects of contemporary and historical Australian culture. The $155m competition brief proposed the incorporation of two new axes across the 11 hectare site, a peninsula projecting into Lake Burley Griffin in the heart of Canberra, Australia’s capital city.

The museum employs the metaphor of a Boolean string, a computer-generated mathematical guide. The string represents a tangling of these formalized aces; its contortions embrace the site, creating a continuous experience of land, water, space and building. Along and around this axis there is an exploration of the issues and themes which have made significant marks in the social history of the country. Through an extension of the ideas inherent in museology, the landscape of the entire site takes on a meaning well beyond the simple geographical place as a peninsula in an artificial lake.

The National Museum of Australia is a cultural history museum with five permanent exhibitions, a touring gallery, three high definition digital theatres, workshops and unloading facilities, curatorial facilities and major public function and orientation spaces, restaurants, retail and grand public spaces. It brings together Australia’s stories, each presented with state-of-the-art technology and hands-on interactive exhibitions. The 64,500-square-foot museum contains over 5,000 artifacts.

The tangled threads, manifest in the forms of the ribbon canopies, pathways, landscape elements and the crescent-shaped footprint of the building, are a reference to the convergence of cultures within Australia. The symbolism of the knot is also a commentary on the complexity of contemporary issues relating to indigenous Australians. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, incorporated in the Museum, is a black version of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, a sardonic reference to the notion of a white icon. The project was delivered through an innovative form of procurement called Project Alliancing. This is the first time this has been used on a building project in the world, and together with Alliance partners it delivered excellent results with no disputes on time and on budget.

[Show as slideshow]