Cultural Infrastructures: Museums in the Age of the Experience Economy (MArch Studio)

7 SYDNEY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND PLANNING

2019

‘The Craft Machine’ Gloria Ha

8 SYDNEY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND PLANNING

Cultural Infrastructures:

Graduation Studio

MARC5001 Semester 1 2019

Sandra Löschke

Tutors Mano Ponnambalam Roger Rajaratnam

Museums in the Age of the

Contemporary architecture is about people. In fact, this is what makes it truly contemporary – its foregrounding of human experiences, encounters, and engagement over objects. Over the past decades, the growing desire for self-representation and heightened life experiences have shaped a contemporary culture, where qualitative distinctions between high and low culture, critical discernment and entertainment, elite and mass audiences are increasingly levelled in favour of alternative cultural understandings. Nowhere is this development more visible than in contemporary museums, where visitor experience and highly aestheticised environments have reversed the relations between displays and architecture, whereby the latter provides the experience and collections and displays have become secondary “extras”.¹

The studio brief is the design of a contemporary art museum that explores the rise of the experience economy and the experience society in a critical and innovative way. The proposed sites are the Domain Car Park (DCP) and the Overseas Passenger Terminal (OPT) at Circular Quay – both represent uses that are no longer desired in inner urban areas and are predestined to become obsolete. Located in close proximity to two of Sydney’s most prominent cultural institutions, the AGNSW and the MCA , these sites offer an opportunity for critiquing existing institutions through the proposal of viable alternatives for the display of contemporary art.

Experience Economy

¹ Bourriaud, Nicolas. “The Exhibition in the Age of Formatting.” Critique d’art 47 (30 November 2016): 1-4.

2019