Contemporary art plays an increasingly important role in cities’ efforts to remake themselves. At a local level, city makers have deployed cultural institutions to act as catalysts for strategic urban development. At a global scale, cities have repositioned themselves by building new museums, establishing biennales and hosting art fairs in an effort to improve brand, cultural rankings and global relevance. Parallel to this, the storage, circulation and logistics of the art collections maintained by these increasingly powerful cultural institutions have become a focus of recent architectural investigations in their own right, with projects such as the Schaulager, the Fondazione Prada, and the Broad.
In this studio subject, students developed new proposals for art storage in a highly inventive and radical process, speculating on the potential of this seemly mundane technical requirement to produce new types of contemporary art institutions for Sydney’s Bays Precinct.
