Peter Timms The Australian
TO be frank, it’s a mess at present: a higgledy-piggledy cluster of structures built at various times during the past 200 years, tacked together with corridors, stairways and adhoc additions. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery boasts that it occupies the most important collection of historic buildings in Australia, but that doesn’t make it any easier to negotiate. Turning it into a coherent, functioning modern museum would seem an impossible task. Yet, if a new master plan for the gallery is any indication, Sydney architects Johnson Pilton Walker and local firm Terroir appear to have pulled it off brilliantly. TMAG could become the nation’s first truly postmodern museum, provided the state government can come up with $150 million or so. The plan is on display in the museum’s old Bond Store. This robust Georgian pile, with its huge timber beams and massive stone walls, is a colonial gem. But it was designed to house flour and barrels of rum, not to display art, and heritage restrictions mean that little can be done to adapt it. The Bond Store epitomises the problems the architects faced. Read more here
