In this studio subject, students began by creating a venue for a specific event, either in or around the existing Powerhouse Museum. First, they identified the fundamental infrastructure required to support the most diminutive form of event. From these core spatial, programmatic and structural fundamentals, students then increased their venue capacity three times over the semester, each time by a factor of 10. These increases resulted in new challenges of location and site, increasingly complex programmatic concerns, and changes to the infrastructure needed to support these demands.
Throughout this process, students tested and evaluated strategies by which scale may be achieved, whether through simply creating a larger venue, by borrowing from shared public space, or by setting the ground rules that allow duplication at a similar scale to form a series of venues.
The Collective Museum was a proposal for a new urban strategy for the Powerhouse Museum, creating an integrated museum network within the city. It gives back to the city, embedding alternative hybrid museum institutes into the existing urban fabric surrounding the current Powerhouse Museum site. It feeds off existing museum conservation programs concealed behind the wall edge, physically drawing them into the urban domain, overlapping them with the social nature of the exhibition strip to form hybrid relationships between public space and private knowledge.
