National Museum of Australia - Architecture

Architecture

As designed by architect Howard Raggatt (design architect and design director for the project), the museum building is based on a theme of knotted ropes, symbolically bringing together the stories of Australians. The architects stated: "We liked to think that the story of Australia was not one, but many tangled together. Not an authorized version but a puzzling confluence; not merely the resolution of difference but its wholehearted embrace." The building is meant to be the centre of a knot, with trailing ropes or strips extending from the building. The most obvious of these extensions forms a large loop before becoming a walkway which extends past the neighbouring AIATSIS building ending in a large curl, as if a huge ribbon has haphazardly unrolled itself along the ground. Known as the "Uluru Axis" because it aligns with the central Australian natural landmark, the ribbon symbolically integrates the site with the Canberra city plan by Walter Burley Griffin and the spiritual heart of indigenous Australia.

The shape of the main entrance hall continues this theme: it is as though the otherwise rectangular building has been built encasing a complex knot which does not quite fit inside the building, and then the knot taken away. The entirely non-symmetrical complex is designed to not look like a museum, with startling colours and angles, unusual spaces and unpredictable projections and textures.

Though hard to precisely categorise, the building can be seen as an example of Charles Jenck's "new paradigm". Some characteristics of Deconstructivism can also be identified.

The organising concept of the scheme using the idea of a "tangled vision" incorporates a variety of references including:

• Bea Maddock's "Philosophy Tape"
• Jackson Pollock's "Blue Poles"
• boolean string, a knot, and Ariadne's thread
• the Aboriginal Dreamtime story of the Rainbow Serpent making the land.

The building's architecture is thus meant to imply that the story of Australia is not one story, but many stories tangled together. The building also refers to or quotes other buildings:

• a Burley-Griffin designed cloister at Newman College in Melbourne
• the Sydney Opera House – both the parts designed by Jørn Utzon, and sections designed by the other architects
• the shell curves of Félix Candela
• the Hall is evocative of Eero Saarinen's terminal at the J F Kennedy Airport in New York
• the arc is like a piece of work by Richard Serra
• the Garden of Australian Dreams is meant to evoke a range of different cartographies
• the walls use selected fragments of the word Eternity – evoking the story of Arthur Stace who for thirty years chalked this single word on the pavements of Sydney
• the most controversial quotation is a reference to the Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum Berlin, Germany which opened in 1999

The plan of the National Museum of Australia incorporates an exact copy of the lightning-flash zigzag that Libeskind created for the Berlin Museum by breaking a star of David. The Bulletin magazine first publicly raised allegations of plagiarism in June 2000. Libeskind was reported to be angry with the copying. Raggatt's defence against plagiarism was that the design was a quotation rather than a copy. The director of the museum, Dawn Casey, claimed in the press that she and her council were not aware of this symbolism when they approved the plan.

The exterior of the building is covered in anodised aluminium panels. Many of the panels include words written in braille and other decorative devices. Among the messages are "mate" and "she'll be right". Also included were such controversial words and phrases as "sorry" and "forgive us our genocide". These more controversial messages have been obscured with silver discs being attached to the surface making the braille illegible.

Among the phrases in braille are the words "Resurrection city". The phrase may refer to the clearing of the former Canberra Hospital to make way for the museum or it could be a reference to reconciliation between Indigenous Australians and European settlers. The phrase is used as a label in tiles on another of Raggett's buildings, the Storey Hall in Melbourne. Raggett says of that message: "I guess that tries to be some big sort of theme for this building as well and its sort of set of memories."

It was built by Bovis Lend Lease and completed in 2001.