DCM win ACMI

peter_j

Press Release from ACMI Melbourne.

Thursday 9 August
Project to create landmark gallery commences
Tony Sweeney, Director, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) today said the collaboration between London’s Ab Rogers Design and Melbourne’s Denton Corker Marshall (DCM) to deliver a new gallery for ACMI would create a cultural landmark for Victoria.

Ab Rogers Design with DCM has won the international tender to design the multi-million dollar project, which will feature a permanent exhibition dedicated to the history and future of the moving image. The tender drew widespread interest from the world’s leading exhibition designers, attracting submissions from Australia, the United States and Europe, with the combination of fresh ideas, passion and experience in the Ab
Rogers/DCM proposal being a standout.

‘Ab is fresh, vibrant and even playful in his approach to design, and produces sophisticated yet highly engaging gallery environments. He crafts space, materials, textures, colour, artefacts and striking imagery in atmospheric ways that reflect the fluid nature of the moving image,’ Tony said. ‘His inventive approach to finding a powerful
blend of form and content in gallery design convinced us he was the right person to help realise our ambition to create a truly unique gallery for the 21st century.’
The gallery will offer a free permanent exhibition celebrating the moving image in all its forms - film, television, games and new media. It will encompass the entire ground floor of ACMI, creating an interactive, immersive and exciting exhibition targeting families, tourists and the education sector.

Ab Rogers said he was excited to be working with ACMI on such a significant cultural project for Melbourne. ‘We love to work with people who share our passion and excitement for creating vibrant cultural spaces that genuinely engage audiences in ways that offer extraordinary experiences rather than the everyday,’ Ab said. ‘We approach each project with a desire to bring life to objects and spaces, making them responsive rather than passive, and we create spaces that are playful and serious, sensual and functional, poetic and pragmatic’. Ab Rogers Design has delivered cultural projects for the Tate Modern (London), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Science Museum (London) and Centre Pompidou (Paris). DCM is recognised for its landmark major
projects including the Melbourne Museum, Melbourne Exhibition Centre and the Melbourne Gateway.

The new ACMI exhibition will document the important and varied contributions of Australians to the evolution of the moving image, and examine how Australians consume and experience the moving image in its diverse forms. ‘The moving image is all around, permeating our daily lives. In this new gallery, we’ll be taking the familiar and
making it unfamiliar, offering audiences an outstanding visitor experience that challenges, surprises and entertains in a gallery space of truly world-class design,’ Tony said.
The project is being supported by the Victorian Government and will be completed in 2008.

hairdresser

state govt. architect gives himself a job?

simon seasons

I note that "The gallery will offer a free permanent exhibition- encompasasing the entire ground floor". Ironic for an institution calling itself a repository of the moving image. Considering that the first attempt was so woefully unattended due to having been deposited into the basement recesses of Fed Square like some sort of embarressment. Consider also that an exhibition space that spruics itself as being a permanent display is usually one on which just enough money will be spent to get a structure up but never enough to use it as one would think an exhibition space should be used.
Call me post modern but I think that an exhibition space is one that 'fills with the spirit and not just the word' only when the audience acts to give it meaning by thier attendance. Art is not and hasn't been for quite a while and certainly not since the moving image was invented by Edward Muybridge, a thing that is merely deposited. How it is viewed and interpreted is as much an act of art as the object itself. In essence the 'exhibition space' was itself amongst the first 'art objects' to be interpreted this way. Witness the London great exhibiton's crystal palace and Te Papa in New Zealand both of which took seriously the effect that they would have on the public and the publics effect upon them. Melbourne will get bored pretty quickly with a permanent exhibition just as they're already a bit bored with Fed Square. Perhaps, hairdresser, the state govt architect is instead giving himself a millstone to hang round his neck

hairdresser

he wears his millstone proudly on top of his neck.

BTW - SS - permanent free exhibition in the ground floor maybe just another name for decorated foyer - in dated landmark - ie empty icon.

The extraction of an architectural "idea" and its application to a neutral section of the program that can without struggle bear the burden is the signature of the mercantile architectural class in Victoria.

The commission ideally suits Lyons - that office has the skills to guarantee melbourn-ness and unashamedly put art (cinema) in its proper place.