Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip, Perth

About

Located in Perth’s cultural center and formed with renovated heritage-listed buildings – an old prison, a library, and an art gallery – and new volumes, the WA Museum Boola Bardip provides spaces for exhibitions and events, and new retail and dining. The new museum showcases the State’s natural and cultural collections, and has been conceived as a framework to share the diverse stories of Western Australia, a State characterized by its extraordinary people and places and home to the oldest continuous culture on earth, an increasingly diverse, multicultural population, and a world biodiversity hotspot. In the museum, heritage and contemporary structures complement each other. New volumes wrap around the heritage buildings to create two core elements of the museum: two intersecting circulation loops that offer a variety of curatorial possibilities, and a ‘City Room’ – a public space at the museum’s center for cultural programs and daily activities. The facades of the preserved and revitalized buildings on site maintain their massive character, while the glass walls of the prisms, clad with perforated metal facades, shine under sunlight and glow in the dark.

Sources

• Arquitectura Viva