VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
Between 2004 and 2011, the Dutch architecture office OMA with its founding partner, Rem Koolhaas, made an unexpected entry into the discourse of preservation via a series of high-profile lectures, publications and curated exhibitions. Often associated with the rejection of context, OMA and their research arm, AMO, used these presentations to look back at their own practice, reframing more than three decades of work. At the same time, Koolhaas announced preservation as an escape from the incessant demand for novel form, while taking aim at those preservation practices for whom “the past becomes the only plan for the future.” While the topic of preservation has since disappeared from OMA’s public agenda, their practice has continued to produce challenging adaptations of heritage sites around the world. Their projects include the subject of this paper, Boola Bardip, the new Western Australian Museum in Perth, opened in 2020. There, alongside local practice Hassell, OMA have installed new structures around, above and through a group of important heritage-listed buildings, resulting in a complex architectural amalgam. Most interestingly, the new work captures and frames the existing 19th century structures as if they are part of the museum collection itself. In this way, OMA’s design establishes a contest between form-finding and form-making, between preservation and curation, blurring the distinction between the practices of architecture, heritage and museology. In this paper, we explore what is at stake in these contests for Boola Bardip, for heritage as a subject in OMA’s oeuvre, and for heritage preservation more broadly.
Ashley Paine is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland. His current research interests include the collection and reconstruction of architecture by museums, and the preservation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s built works. He has contributed to journals including AA Files, Future Anterior, and Interstices, and published widely in academic, professional and popular journals. His most recent book, Valuing Architecture: Heritage and the Economics of Culture (with Susan Holden and John Macarthur) was published in 2020. Paine is also a practicing architect, and co-founder of PHAB Architects.
Susan Holden is an Architect and Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland where she teaches in the Architecture and Urban Design programs. Her research explores the values of architecture in culture and society with a focus on the design of the public realm, architecture in cultural institutions, and design governance and policy. Her research has been widely published including in the Journal of Architecture, Leonardo, and AA Files. Recent book publications include Pavilion Propositions (2018), Trading Between Architecture and Art (2019) and Valuing Architecture (2020).;
Charles Sale is a student in the Master of Architecture program at the University of Queensland (UQ). He also works as a casual research assistant at UQ, and in the award winning Brisbane based architecture studio, Atelier Chen Hung (A-CH).