High praise for young museum
by Amelia Mulcahy
UniSA’s Architecture Museum, at the City West campus, has twice been highly commended at the Museums Australia Multimedia and Publications Design Awards 2009.
The UniSA Architecture Museum houses over 200,000 items of architectural records of South Australia’s built heritage. Director of the four-year-old museum (formerly the Architecture Archive), Dr Christine Garnaut said she is delighted with the awards, which she believes represent great success for such a young museum.
"When we were shortlisted, I didn’t know how we would go, but it was a remarkable feeling on the night to be named for the first time in a public forum and be on-stage in front of all the leading museums and galleries in Australia," she said.
The first award acknowledges the Architects of South Australia online database launched in 2008 to provide biographical information on a selection of leading South Australian architects and their contributions to the State’s built environment from 1836 until today.
Dr Garnaut said the database was created to fill a need for scholarly research material on South Australian architects.
"It means researchers no longer have to search around for sources but can use this database as their starting point," she said.
"There is a published history of the profession in SA up until 1986, but there’s very little published on individuals in the field."
The second award was for the Architecture Museum’s two monographs on South Australian architects, Russell Ellis and Brian Claridge.
Dr Garnaut said the monographs were an appealing and accessible way to present a series of reports from recipients of the Department for Environment and Heritage’s (DEH) SA Built Heritage Research Fellowship.
DEH, in conjunction with UniSA, established the Fellowship to strengthen the quality research available on South Australia’s built heritage.
"Rather than producing the report required from the Fellowship in a usual format for what might be a limited audience, we thought the production of a monograph, including photographs and drawings, would ensure the key information appealed to a wider audience," she said.
The judges of the Awards agreed, saying the monographs demonstrated "clear classic design and typography on a beautiful scale".
The monographs also offered an opportunity for collaboration between the Museum and UniSA’s Visual Communications Consultancy students from the South Australian School of Art who worked on the designs.