Melbourne Museum

Melbourne Museum

Melbourne Museum in the Carlton Gardens
Established	1854
Location	Melbourne, Australia
Type	History museum
Website	http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/

Melbourne Museum is a natural and cultural history museum located in the Carlton Gardens in Melbourne, Australia, adjacent to the Royal Exhibition Building.

It was designed by Denton Corker Marshall Architects and finished construction in 2001. Situated in the Carlton Gardens, it was commissioned by the Victorian Government Office of Major Projects on behalf of Museums Victoria. The museum is a rich response to Melbourne’s urban condition, and provides a place for education, history, culture and society to engage with each other in a contemporary setting. It is now an important part of Melbourne’s soft infrastructure.

It is the largest museum in the Southern Hemisphere, and is a venue of Museum Victoria, which also operates the Immigration Museum and Scienceworks Museum.

The museum has seven main galleries, a Children's Gallery and a temporary exhibit gallery on three levels, Upper, Ground and Lower Level and was constructed by Baulderstone Hornibrook.

The Touring Hall is where temporary exhibits are displayed. Past exhibits include mummies from Egypt and dinosaurs from China. The Big Box is part of the Children's Gallery.

In addition, the museum has other facilities such as the Sidney Myer Amphitheatre and The Age Theatre. The Discovery Centre, on the Lower Level, is a free public research centre. The museum also has a cafe and a souvenir shop.

The IMAX Theatre, which is situated on the Lower Level is also part of the museum complex. It shows movies, usually documentary films, in 3-D format.

The Melbourne Museum is a post-modernist building, structured with a grid-like order that embraces eccentric metal clad forms extruding out and creating an irregular sculptural composition with moments of abstract colour throughout the building. A building of the public, the museum is arranged in a volumetrically individual layout, referencing Melbourne’s iconic Hoddle Grid, which allows the importance of each component of the buildings historical, cultural and social significance to be read in loosely equal hierarchy and individuality, being the Imax theatre, and Aboriginal centre. The building can be dissected into different spaces so an individual can navigate through and around the building in an orthogonal manner. It is both a single building, and a network of individual buildings integrated into the landscape of the Carlton Gardens. The new museum is axially aligned with the adjacent neo-classical Royal Exhibition Building, and references it along with the skyscrapers of Melbourne’s central business district, with its monumental scale, and horizontality with protruding vertical facets. The sticks and blades that make up the Melbourne Museum are signatures of Denton Corker Marshall’s architecture. The most iconic detail of the building is the spectacular cantilever that projects over to the west, on the central axis with the Royal Exhibition centre, this cantilever can be seen from kilometres away. On the northern side resides a large, taller sloped roof than that of the cantilever, similar in scale to the dome of the Royal Exhibition building.