Has the National Museum got it all wrong? A response to Keith Windschuttle. (History).

IN THE SEPTEMBER 2001 edition of Quadrant, Keith Windschuttle reviewed the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. His assessment was scathing. In summary, Windschuttle described the museum as "a profound intellectual mistake as well as a great waste of public money. Indeed ... it is not a real museum at all."

The National Museum and the new Melbourne Museum have opened very recently; the former in March 2001, the latter in October 2000. They are both very large museums, costing approximately $155 million and $300 million respectively. Together with Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, which opened in February 1998, they are the flagships of museums in this part of the world, vast in size and in the scope of their coverage.

Not surprisingly, and indeed quite appropriately, such large cultural capital works involving very significant amounts of public dollars have attracted attention and scrutiny. They have also attracted various views as to their success and worthiness as museums. It is only healthy that we should assess how our tax dollars are spent. It is also only healthy that diverse views are expressed and given a hearing in the media.

All three of these new "mega-museums" have met with their share of criticism. All three have also been praised, on various grounds. They are all monumental works of architecture. Appreciation of architecture is a very personal thing, just as is appreciation of art. It would be rare for any striking building design to meet with universal praise. The icons of architecture tend to become that over time.

Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House, now a candidate for World Heritage listing, was scandalously controversial, for its design and its cost, up to and following its opening in 1973. Needless to say it is now a symbol of a city, and arguably the architectural symbol of a nation. Its inherently poor (some would say dys-) functionality as a performing arts space has been subsumed within the grandeur of its style.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York was an extension of art deco/art moderne design on its opening in 1959, looking both backward and forward in a design sense. Now an architectural destination, the Guggenheim with its unique spiral galleries presents an odd mix of challenges to the art curator who actually needs flexible spaces to display largely two-dimensional--and usually flat--works of art. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, opened in October 1997, has transformed a struggling industrial town into a site of cultural pilgrimage, as much to see Frank Gehry's building as the art works it holds.

Cultural institutions like museums, galleries and theatres offer architects great opportunities to create engineering works of art, rather more so than schools, hospitals, prisons or even office buildings. So, have the mega-museums of the antipodes achieved this?