‘A death warrant’: Public slams new Powerhouse plans

Critics of the Minns government’s plans for a revitalised Powerhouse Museum are concerned the $300 million city project will deliver fewer exhibition spaces and result in unsympathetic and irreversible alterations to its modern additions.

Just five of 126 public submissions supported Labor’s latest plans for the Ultimo museum which shut its doors in February. This compares to 109 who were opposed. A further twelve commented on the proposal and were regarded as neutral.

Inside the Powerhouse before its closure in February.Credit: Dean Sewell

The new plans aim to bring an end to nine years of controversy, including two parliamentary inquiries, over the museum’s future.

They call for the forecourt of the Powerhouse Museum at Ultimo to be demolished to make way for a new library, learning centre and courtyard. The museum’s main Harris Street entrance is to be reoriented to face the Goods Line and China Town.

Internal ramps, stairs and mezzanines used for smaller-scale exhibitions, education spaces, or visitor viewpoints are to be also removed to reveal original heritage features and the facade of its historic buildings.

Infrastructure NSW chief executive Tom Gellibrand told the Herald last month the revitalised Powerhouse Ultimo would result in more exhibition space overall, not less, and “vastly improved” spaces.

Renders of the new look Powerhouse Museum at Ultimo.Credit: Durbach Block Jaggers Architects and Architectus

The museum’s neighbour, the University of Technology of Sydney, said the project would aid in “creating the truly vibrant, diverse and inclusive hive of creativity, invention, commerce and community required for our precinct to truly be the collision of creativity and technology”.

UTS recommended the rejuvenation of Harris Street, including the widening of its pedestrian footpath, and a review of the design of the public terrace to provide a more useable and functional event space.

The National Trust of Australia urged the museum’s world-leading Steam Revolution display remain.

The building’s concrete floor had been specifically engineered to display steam engines and locomotives and any removal of infrastructure would be extremely costly, and prevent a far more worthwhile expenditure of a limited budget on other key new components of the proposed design. Any planning approval should await a final decision on a bid to expand the buildings’ heritage listing, it said.

The City of Sydney supported in principle the revitalisation of the Powerhouse Ultimo site as a museum space for the community but sought further clarification of changes to the retained buildings.

Town Hall added: “It should be ensured that there is no reduction in exhibition space.”

Heritage specialists, Design 5 Architects, said the proposal almost completely erased the “intangible and innate connection between the buildings and spaces, and the collection, and what is not erased is entombed in a new structure to conceal it.”

The process that has resulted in this proposal has been fatally flawed from the beginning, being driven by an agenda to dismantle and destroy the museum, an investigation and decision-making process that had little to no transparency and the unwillingness of a new government to call out and rectify these errors,” the submission said.

“We know this lack of transparency is true as we were one of those consultants engaged by government to investigate the significance of the Powerhouse Museum and complete a draft Conservation Management Plan … to guide its future, including major changes.”

‘[Powerhouse] collection holds artefacts of world significance. The current dumbing down of a once proud institution will be catastrophic.’

Historian Dr Shirley Fitzgerald

Docomomo, a non-profit organisation lobbying to save modern buildings, predicted very little, other than the structural ribs of the vaults of the 1988 Wran Wing and Galleria would be retained. Even then, the south end of the Wran Wing was “indicated for demolition and truncation in length”.

Historian Dr Shirley Fitzgerald said the Powerhouse Museum was “not just any old museum”.

“Its collection holds artefacts of world significance,” she wrote. “The current dumbing down of a once proud institution will be a catastrophic loss of excellence to Sydney, NSW, and the wider community.”

Author Judith White, an advocate of sustainable public funding for cultural institutions, said revitalisation was a poor name for the plan.

“In fact, it’s a death warrant for an excellent museum, and a broken promise to the people of NSW,” she said.

Former government architect, Lionel Glendenning, who designed the 1988 building adaption, said he would have been expected to be consulted in any heritage revitalisation plan but had not.

In every area, the planning documents were “inadequate, tendentious, inconsequential, erroneous [and] amateurish based on incorrect references or irrelevancies”.

The project now goes to the Department of Planning to assess whether it is worthy of state significant development status. Expressions of interest have been called for construction partners.

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