The Bula Bardip Museum of Western Australia (translated from the Nyunger language - "many stories") brought together historical museum and museum buildings, including the Old Prison of the mid-19th century.
Modern facades are clad with perforated metal panels. The core of the complex is the so-called City Room, a public space formed by its new part, including an expansive console. This is an intermediate territory between the interior of the museum with its two looped routes of observation - horizontal and vertical - and the city.
Perth is the capital of the state of Western Australia, the world leader in the extraction of iron ore and liquefied natural gas - but also a place of special biodiversity, home to the oldest continuous culture on our planet; and there is also the largest accumulation of petroglyphs.
This contradiction is reflected in the museum. It was the mining corporations that sponsored the architectural and museological project, which covered a total of 19,000 m2 and AU $ 400 million, and the exhibits take this into account, but at the same time they do not. They are devoted, among other things, to the problem of environmental protection and the protection of the culture of the aborigines from the expansion of companies developing all new deposits, but a number of
no place was found in the halls of the museum.
Nevertheless, when creating the exposition, the opinions of representatives of 70 aboriginal language groups (there are no tribes in Australia) were taken into account, and from the very beginning the museum leadership strove for a "binocular view" on all topics and especially problems. Naturally, “naive” harmony is unattainable - and this is exactly what the completely non-“harmonious” combination of the new and historical parts of the museum reminds of. But quite comfortable coexistence of completely different phenomena is possible - like the same OMA building and Victorian buildings, which do not interfere at all, but successfully complement each other.
