Musgrave Park Cultural Centre

The proposed building has two primary functions: meeting space for community gatherings and an art gallery. In addition to these primary spaces, an administration area is provided to manage these spaces and organise a wide range of community functions and events.

The building site is irregularly shaped and is strongly defined by long-established fig-trees, and which are remnant landscaped elements of the original Park design which is based on Victorian Park design principles of formal organisation.

Our approach is to achieve a high degree of transparency between inside and outside and to treat interior spaces as a field of spaces. The building's form was to be a simple series of wraps – where walls and roofs merge – the fundamentals of the enclosure.

Contemporary ‘Aboriginal Architecture’ is defined in the design intent as an intervention (building, landscape or both) on a site that in some way generates an Aboriginal quality about itself. We believe that the development of Aboriginal qualities can best be achieved as part of the design process, more so than searching for suitable formal architectural expression or use of symbolism.

Formally the building design presents an Aboriginal culture that will be conveyed as overtly contemporary and urban.