Gifted to the Australian people by Arthur and Yvonne Boyd, Bundanon’s purpose is to foster an appreciation and understanding of art and the environment. The new works enable expanded programming towards this and an opportunity to open this extraordinary place and its $46M art collection to the public with a museum of national significance. Developed as a suite of buildings and landscapes the concept integrates the many aspects of the site’s history - Indigenous, Pastoral, The Boyds’, Education Trust - to work as a rich ensemble of distinct historic and cultural periods.
The new works comprise site infrastructure and two buildings – the Art Museum embedded in the landscape and The Bridge, a Creative Learning Centre with accommodation, suspended above a gully. This core visitor program is collocated adjacent to the historic Boyd cluster to achieve an accessible, centralised and single heart, of existing and new, united by a common level, Forecourt and Arrival Hall. It incorporates radical solutions to a changing climate with a net zero energy target and will be defendable against fire and flood which for millennia have shaped this landscape. The building and landscape design approach was necessarily driven by resilience, resistance and ecological repair.
The Art Museum, with Collection Store, is resistant to fire. It is subterranean. Precious artworks are housed and exhibited in an underground building, which protects the works from diverse climate conditions and offers thermal stability in the form of the reinstated hill.
By contrast, the Bridge is resilient. Treated as flood infrastructure the architecture supports rather than impedes the overland flow and sporadic floodwaters below it. A 165-metre-long by 9-metre-wide structure that at one end abuts the Museum, bridges the reinstated wet gully and accommodates 32 bedrooms, breezeways, creative learning, dining spaces and a public cafe.
The architecture supports rather than impedes the natural systems of the site, sensitively embracing the existing landscape and ecology.
