Description
The Melbourne Museum is a post-modernist building, structured with a grid-like order that embraces eccentric metal clad forms extruding out and creating an irregular sculptural composition with moments of abstract colour throughout the building. A building of the public, the museum is arranged in a volumetrically individual layout, referencing Melbourne’s iconic Hoddle Grid, which allows the importance of each component of the buildings historical, cultural and social significance to be read in loosely equal hierarchy and individuality, examples being the Imax theatre, and Aboriginal centre. The building is can be dissected into different spaces so an individual can navigate through and around the building in an orthogonal manner. It is both a single building, and a network of individual buildings integrated into the landscape of the Carlton Gardens. The new museum is axially aligned with the adjacent neo-classical Royal Exhibition Centre, and references it along with the skyscrapers of Melbourne’s central business district, with its monumental scale, and horizontality with protruding vertical facets. The sticks and blades that make up the Melbourne Museum are signatures of Denton Corker Marshall’s architecture. The most iconic detail of the building is the spectacular cantilever that projects over to the west, on the central axis with the Royal Exhibition centre, this cantilever can be seen from kilometres away. On the northern side resides a large, taller sloped roof than that of the cantilever, similar in scale to the dome of the Royal Exhibition building.
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