The Australian Museum has officially opened its new ‘front door’ to the world – the Neeson Murcutt and Joseph Grech-designed ‘Crystal Hall’, a glass pleated, carbon neutral pavilion featuring leading environmental technology. Designed to “float transparently” off the Museum’s sandstone northern façade, it provides a new main entrance servicing the building’s repositioned address, 1 William Street, Sydney.
“This is a stunning, highly visible new space for the Australian Museum and City of Sydney, one that allows us to realise and complete the critical first stage of our ongoing transformation,” Kim McKay AO, Executive Director and CEO of the Australian Museum, said.
“Crystal Hall helps achieve the AM’s plans in a sophisticated way. It allows us to visibly extend a welcoming hand to visitors while enlivening and connecting us to William Street. As importantly, it represents not just a new reception area for the AM, but an exhibition space, an out-of-hours venue, and a new gathering point for the public, while liberating exhibition space internally.”
“Crystal Hall and the associated works have only been possible due to the State Government’s vision in supporting the project,” McKay added.
“From day one we enjoyed the full support of the State Government, in particular NSW Government Architect Peter Poulet and his team, who gave us the confidence to embark on this exciting development.”
Key architectural features of the crystalline hall include:
- A defining glass-pleated north-facing façade.
This bespoke, zig-zagged crystalline screen balances transparency through to the existing heritage building with leading environmental management. The state-of-the-art, triple-low-E, double-glazed façade selectively allows daylight in while reflecting short wave and infrared heat. Extended vertically and horizontally beyond the floorplate, the screen features 24 stainless steel-framed, 8.5 metre high panels formed into 12 dramatic vertical ‘pleats’. - A slim-line ‘crystalline and skeletal’ form reflecting the Museum’s natural history focus.
Designed as a simple, open plan elongated space, 20 metres by eight metres, with a 5.5 metre high ceiling and ‘feathered’ northern edge. Operable glass walls frame the southern elevation and heritage façade while providing ventilation. Zinc cladding wraps the eastern elevation externally, with a wall of A/V screens internally for functions and showcasing exhibitions, while providing a sense of shelter. Operable glass walls and doors frame the entry and west. - An Australian-first environmental management system addressing solar glare and heat.
Developed for the first time by Neeson Murcutt Architects, Joseph Grech Architects and engineers Arup collaboratively to manage solar glare and heat in a uniquely innovative way. Forty-eight unique crystalline diamond-shaped, coloured glass ‘blades’ are positioned internally along the northern façade, angled and pivot-hung in each pleat (four per pleat) to refract and diffuse light, manage solar glare and capture heat, allowing it to be vented up and out through the ceiling. Six different ‘soft colours’ – shades of mauve, blue, pink and yellow – are used across the façade, with the system expected to allow natural ventilation of the north-facing glass hall for most of the year.
Architect Rachel Neeson said Crystal Hall responds directly to the Museum’s brief for an elevated, highly transparent, elegant glass entry pavilion on a north-facing elevation overlooking William Street. As importantly, she said, it needed to respond appropriately to the exposed north-facing site and climatic conditions, with Neeson Murcutt and Joseph Grech Architects (Architects in Association) working closely with consulting engineers Arup to develop innovative solutions to optimise the building’s structural and environmental performance.
Keen to avoid a ‘standard corporate’ response, the architects embraced a tailor-made approach typical of their award-winning bodies of work – one which was appropriate for a public building with the statue of the AM.
“The Crystal Hall (156m2) is a new transparent entry to the Museum that accommodates ‘welcome’, ticketing and out-of-hours functions,” Neeson said. “The most significant feature of the new entry is its main façade to William Street – a bespoke crystalline screen that balances the need for openness with environmental management. An abstracted crystal, it hints at what you might find inside the Museum itself.”
Key to the screen’s success, and that of the project itself, was the development of the building’s unique diamond-coloured ‘blades’, each blade comprising three sheets of glass, and operable positioning within each pleat. The first sheet, prismatic glass to diffuse as much light as possible; the second, a coloured layer for glare; and, the third a frit (spotted) layer to help with shading. Sets of blades can be re-angled to deal with changing climatic conditions.
Arup Principal (Building Physics) Haico Schepers said: “It was important to come up with a solution that kept the architectural intervention as light and transparent as possible, and played off the ideas of geology, skeletons and natural forms. We did a lot of work, analysis, research and testing to develop for the first time the glass diamonds in the crystal hall.”
Visitors enter along ‘Museum Walk’, a 4.5 metre ramp providing equal access for all from the corner of William and Collage streets. Set back from the historic façade, it rises as a floating pavement of bluestone, etched with 20,000 year-old footprints of Australia’s first people, replicated from fossils found in the Willandra Lakes, in Mungo National Park in western New South Wales.
Neeson said: “Our concept was to create a new glass façade that would generate its own interest running parallel to the existing sandstone façade. A crystalline screen that would be like a glass wall you could sit behind, rather than a glass box you go into. We then worked to fit the narrowest box possible behind this, with a narrow band between the new façade and the existing building. This new pavilion was then linked gently to the museum with a connecting bridge, with an existing hallway inside the museum streamlined to improve visitor flow and wayfinding.”
Ten slender columns lightly support the pavilion structure, allowing it to hover gently above an undercroft space to known as the ‘Sheltered Garden’, functioning in the future as a new 120 square metre public outdoor room.
Crystal Hall, which houses a selection of the AM’s extensive crystal collection, was completed in less than 14 months as one of several Stage One transformation projects, others being the opening of the new 630 square metre Wild Planet gallery, three other new galleries, a public lift, a new rooftop café offering views of St Mary’s Cathedral the Domain and the harbour, as well as a new AM store and upgraded atrium space.
