Studio spaces, retail offerings and food and beverage outlets will be a part of the upgraded Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo under ambitious plans to transform the site into a late-night precinct.
Opening hours will be extended into the evening to allow people to visit exhibitions after work at the cultural institution, which is expected to have a focus on fashion and design.
Powerhouse chief executive Lisa Havilah is leading a $500 redevelopment of the museum’s site in Ultimo.Credit: Brook Mitchell
New exhibition spaces will also be built as part of a $500 million redevelopment of the museum, which the NSW government once planned to shut down, but opponents say the Powerhouse in Ultimo will no longer be a museum.
Powerhouse chief executive Lisa Havilah said she wanted the cultural institution to be as vibrant at night as in the daytime.
“So often the night is seen as the purview of sport, live music, restaurants and performance,” she said. “The Powerhouse through its renewal will actively collaborate to expand and rethink what our city is and what it does at night.”
Exhibition programs will be overhauled to encourage people to visit the museum regularly rather than a couple of times in their life.
“We must care for the museum’s legacy and its future and amplify the impact and the contribution that a museum can make”: Powerhouse chief executive Lisa Havilah.Credit: Brook Mitchell
The overhaul of the Powerhouse Museum, including the building of a new campus in Parramatta, has been mired in controversy since it was announced by former premier Mike Baird in 2015.
Havilah said the museum had a responsibility to renew itself “in a way that isn’t tied to precedent, that meets high expectations and redefines what a museum is”.
Havilah’s vision is strongly backed by Arts Minister Ben Franklin who said cultural institutions should “evolve and renew” to meet the changing needs of visitors and industry.
“Museums have a key role to play in the nighttime economy, and they should absolutely stand alongside sport and live music in contributing to the vibrancy of the city at night,” he said.
The museum was criticised for bumping out its Microcars exhibition to host a late-night runway show as part of Australian Fashion Week.
But Havilah said: “To see hundreds of people pack the museum at night to support NSW creative endeavour is exactly how museums should be contributing to contemporary culture.”
Franklin said the Powerhouse Museum had inspired thousands of visitors with its collection of 500,000 objects, “but the truth is the public has seen less than 10 per cent of it presented since 1988 at Ultimo”.
“It is now Powerhouse’s time for renewal, and to be delivering the museum within a creative precinct that engages and supports practitioners is a remarkable ambition that will redefine what the museum means to community and industry,” he said.
The Parramatta Powerhouse Museum design by Moreau Kusunoki + Genton Riverside. Riverside
Half a billion dollars will be spent redeveloping the museum, creating a new entrance towards the city rather than the current front doors that open onto busy Harris Street in Ultimo.
“The renewal will extend the historic architecture and insert contemporary relevance and new levels of connectivity to the broader city by reorienting our relationship to the Goods Line, providing expansive public space and establishing relationships to adjacent precincts,” Havilah said.
However, opponents fear the functions and purpose of the museum will be diminished by the proposed overhaul.
Museum consultant and former Powerhouse trustee Kylie Winkworth said plans to redevelop the Ultimo site were “another attempt to gut and diminish the real Powerhouse Museum so that Parramatta can be the flagship”.
“What will be left at Ultimo after the $500 million non-museum destructive makeover will be a commercially focussed event-driven entertainment and contemporary art centre,” she said.
The redevelopment of the Powerhouse site in Ultimo follows the commencement of construction of a new museum in Parramatta, which will accommodate more than 100 students, researchers and artists as well as vast exhibition spaces.
Labor’s arts spokesman Walt Secord said there were growing doubts about whether the new site in Parramatta “was actually going to be a museum”.
“Make no mistake, it is going to be an events centre with night markets, studios, lavish catering and accommodation facilities – and the government is still refusing to say how much exhibition space will be on-site,” he said.
Secord said it appeared the Ultimo site will be similarly overhauled - “they’ll keep it in name only, and out will go the museum part”.
“The Powerhouse Ultimo and Parramatta have limped from crisis to crisis – whether it was flooding to the fate of Willow Grove to bizarre curatorial decisions to scandalous and bungled fashion shows,” he said.
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