Abstract:
Ashton Raggatt McDougall’s architectural design for the National Museum of Australia (NMA)
has had a reception as heated as the institution itself. In many ways the buildings and institution
are identified, one with the other, to an extent that would seem praiseworthy if not for the fact
that this identification is most often made by the NMA’s vehement critics. Those who oppose the
museum’s presentation of Australian history see the buildings with their various symbols of
atonement as built proof of what they take to be the deleterious effects of relativism in
historiography. Meanwhile some architectural critics find that the building’s general uncertainty
as to its own status as an object ought partly to be blamed on postmodernist museology with its
sometimes Jacobinical disavowal of artefacts and collections in favour of affects of citizenship to
be found in a flux of pixels. Our aim in this paper is introduce a gap between the institution and
its architecture, to describe and to speak for the buildings as significant cultural works in their
own right. We claim that to understand the NMA as a whole it is necessary not to see the
buildings as equipment, as hardware on which to run the institution’s software, or as a form that
naturally and necessarily expresses the content of the museum, but rather to understand the
buildings as art. The architecture of the NMA is a mimesis of the institution where the museum’s
problems are rearranged in semblance and extended into crisis by hyperbole. With the licence of
art, the buildings can and do conduct a discourse with less constraint, and less responsibility, than
the institution housed. Here we are making a supposition, that the category ‘art’ and architecture
understood as art have a particular role in social history museums in presenting what is otherwise
unpresentable, because of lack of evidence, lack of agreement, horror or ennui. We aim to show
that what non-architects might construe as matters of the discourse of cultural policy – that is, the
meaning and value of the popular and of curatorial practice, and the occasioning of interpretation
on the part of visitors – also become the material of an aesthetic logic in the buildings of the
NMA.
