Eucalyptusdom has been awarded in the ‘Inside’ category at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore.
“Eucalyptusdom reckons with the Powerhouse Museum’s long-standing relationship with the gum tree, presenting over 400 objects from the Museum’s Collection alongside new commissions spanning fields of design, architecture, film, applied arts and performance. The collaborative process drew on the vitality and interconnectedness of the forest, creating a richly layered, multisensory experience.
Presented in a 1400m2 gallery with distinctive 14m barrel ceiling adjacent to a 5m ceiling, we sought to create a sense of intimacy and cohesion between eucalypt, collection and commissions. It is a material able to evoke Country while also meeting the Museum’s conservation conditions, being robust enough for reuse and able to create depth and contrast through natural and form-ply finishes. Audience expectation is subverted entering a vast, darkened space where an absent forest is reanimated through lighting design by Nick Schlieper, sound design by Jane Sheldon and the careful placement of scent-based works by Anna May Kirk and Jonathan Jones. The exhibition’s custom-built timber joinery ‘terrain’ creates a common ‘ground’ for the display of historical objects and contemporary commissions, framing tensions, and affinities, between old and new. The terrain’s counterpart is found in the immense volume of ungrounded space held within the Touring Hall’s barrel vault roof where an installation of nine charcoal sketches of eucalypts by Leplastrier are enlarged and printed inversely on semi-translucent fabric so that negative space dissolves into blackness.
The design resists notoriously unsustainable modes of exhibition design. In response, the architectural terrain can be assembled without fixtures or adhesives, flat-packed for storage and transportation, and made available for reuse. Flexible, modular and sustainable, the timber manufacturing and joinery system, designed in collaboration with Queen & Crawford design workshop, makes use of locally sourced Eucalyptus Pilularis plywood, resolving time constraints in construction and synthesizing with the wider schema.”