BRISBANE’S GALLERY OF MODERN ART
I
n many modern museums, the architecture has a tendency to overwhelm, if not to battle for pre-eminence with the collections.
When architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum building in Berlin was launched in 2001, it was presented and acclaimed as an exhibit in its own right, although the ensuing exhibitions received far less attention. ‘Signature architecture’, along the lines of the Guggenheim Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry, also plays a paramount role in branding the contemporary museum and establishing it as a destination.
Not only the contents but the visitor experiences can be affected by museum buildings. Bored by monotonous interiors, frustrated by a lack of orientation and overpowered by the intensity of the experience, visitors suffer museum fatigue syndrome and depart, exhausted and subdued.
Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art—or GoMA—is more egalitarian in its treatment of both art and visitor and makes a welcome contribution to the development of the contemporary museum idiom. In GoMA, the architects have sympathetically united elements of current architectural form with the overriding needs of the gallery.1
In its location, GoMA takes a deferential back seat to the original, Robin Gibson designed Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) facing Melbourne Street. The new building establishes connections to the river, its riverfront elevation shaded by a deeply overhanging roof with terraces, veranda, balconies and glass-encased viewing spaces focussed outwards, across the river to the city. The north front faces a park, complete with family barbeque area and views of the sea-serpent coils of the William Jolly Bridge.
The main entrance lies across a blazingly hot courtyard opposite the original gallery, where a new Gibson-designed portal faces GoMA at a tantalising angle—not quite on the axis. Passage... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline