Architectural treasure-trove
Every
item on display in the Architectural Preludes exhibition (see opposite
page) comes from the collection of UniSA’s Architecture Museum.
The museum, located in a purpose-built facility in the Kaurna building with the Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design and the South Australian School of Art, holds more than 200,000 catalogued items and is the only repository of its kind in Australia.
A substantial portion of the collection was donated to the School of the Built Environment (predecessor of the current School of Architecture and Design) in 1990 by architectural historian Donald Leslie Johnson, who in the 1970s started his own private collection of documents relating the history and practice of architecture in South Australia.
Thanks
to Johnson’s generosity, the museum holds drawings, specifications,
correspondence, photographs, notebooks, diaries and an extensive library of
books, periodicals and catalogues that provide a unique overview of South
Australian architecture and its social history.
The Architecture Museum is open to UniSA students and staff and the wider community for research. For more information about the Museum and its holdings, visit www.unisa.edu.au/arc/Archarchive or contact Museum Director Dr Christine Garnaut at christine.garnaut@unisa.edu.au or +61 (0)8 8302 0204.