The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), formerly the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, is located on George Street in The Rocks neighbourhood of Sydney. The museum is housed in the Stripped Classical/Art Deco-styled former Maritime Services Board (MSB) building on the western side of Circular Quay. A modern wing was added in 2012.
While the museum as an institution was established in 1991, its roots go back a half-century earlier. Expatriate Australian artist JW Power provided for a museum of contemporary art to be established in Sydney in his 1943 will, bequeathing both money and works from his collection to the University of Sydney, his alma mater. The works, along with others acquired with the money, were exhibited mainly as a travelling collection in the decades afterward, stored in two different university buildings. This collection was known as the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art.
When the MSB building became available the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney was established in 1991. It rapidly outgrew its space and ran into financial difficulties that were alleviated in the early 21st century under new director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, who eliminated regular admission fees and diversified the museum's funding sources. After two proposed expansions failed, a design by local architect Sam Marshall met with sufficient approval to raise money for its construction. From 2010 the building underwent a major expansion and re-development, reopening in 2012 as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Power's original intent was for the museum to exhibit contemporary art from all over the world, with work by Australian artists shown only if it was relevant to the other works, but its focus has since changed primarily to Australian contemporary art. The museum's collection contains over 4,000 works by Australian artists acquired since 1989. They span all art forms with strong holdings in painting, photography, sculpture, works on paper, and moving images, as well as significant representation of works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. The museum runs programs to engage the interest of youth and disabled communities in appreciating and making art.
Building
Location The museum building has two wings: the main section housed in the former Maritime Services Board (MSB) building, and the newer Mordant Wing on the museum's northern end. It is located on the waterfront in Sydney's The Rocks neighbourhood. George Street is to the west, and First Fleet Park to the south, Circular Quay on the north and east (pedestrians only on that side, abutting the water). Immediately beyond it, the Cahill Expressway separates the park and The Rocks from Sydney's central business district (CBD). Two of the city's landmarks are nearby—the Sydney Opera House is visible a short distance across the harbour and the Cahill turns onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the north. Just beyond the expressway to the south are some of Sydney's skyscrapers such as 1 Macquarie Place and the Salesforce Tower
A broad lawn separates the museum from the quay to its east. To the west and northwest, the Rocks is urban and densely developed up to the bridge's southern approach, with attached two- and three-storey mixed-use buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Nearby, cruise ships moor at the quay, and ferries serving the Sydney area arrive and depart from slips.
Exterior The architectural style of the building is Stripped Classical/Art Deco. Former Maritime Services Board building The former MSB building is a six-storey, 17-bay light orange-brown stone structure in the Stripped Classicism style with Art Deco ornamentation. A slightly projecting central clock tower is complemented by three-bay pavilions projecting two bays at the ends of both elevations. Atop the roof is a modern penthouse with glass facing and a flat roof with wide eaves. Two modern roofs, supported by circular metallic pillars, shelter the concrete deck in front of the ground-floor windows between the entrance and the pavilions. The one on the south side has tables and chairs serving the museum's restaurant. On the west (rear) elevation, the space between the pavilions is filled in with a block of modern shop spaces in an irregularly alternating black and white pattern on the upper storeys similar to that on the museum's newer Mordant Wing.
On the exterior, the foundation level is one course of rusticated polished pink Rob Roy granite which also forms the surround of the main entrance on the east elevation and the auxiliary entrance on the south. The rest of the facade is smooth-dressed orange sandstone, which also forms the surround of the tertiary entrance on the north pavilion of the west facade.
Fenestration takes the form of triple-paned double windows separated by a continuous stone muntin in a continuous vertical recessed strip. On the south end of the building, the windows on the first two storeys are also continuous. The recessed strips and muntins end in a broad plain frieze above the fifth storey separating similar but shorter windows on the sixth storey of the main block.
On the central clock tower, the main entrance is a recessed pair of dark bronze doors topped by a sandstone frieze depicting sailors and dockworkers. Above it is a transom of three small four-paned windows with stone muntins. Atop the entryway is a bronze plaque with "Museum of Contemporary Art".See accompanying photo
Above the entrance, the clock tower treatment consists of three more widely separated but otherwise similar windows rising from the third storey to the sixth and topped with a decorative pink granite facade depicting a propeller, wheel, and anchor. A clock set against the sandstone is above. The tower is topped by a narrower stage, a square cupola and three flagpoles.
Mordant Wing
The Mordant Wing on the MSB building's north end is also six storeys high, occupying three-quarters of the remainder of the block not taken up by a local police station building. It is faced in smooth, mostly windowless panels of black, white, and brown stone, made of blocks rectilinear in shape and irregular in size. On the north end is a basement delivery entrance.
The main entrance to the museum is at the southeast corner of the wing, where it abuts the MSB building at a glass-faced stairwell. Sliding glass doors in a glass two-storey entryway open onto a wide stair to the main foyer. Above it is an unsupported projecting three-storey pavilion with strip windows. North of it, a large downward-pointing arrow in the facade at ground level directs visitors to a poem carved in the concrete deck.
On the west, the wing is similarly faced, with an alleyway leading to another service entrance between the wing and the MSB building. At street level is another, smaller entrance, with glass doors, accompanying the museum's gift shop to its south. The facade also overhangs this entrance, but to a lesser extent than its counterpart on the other facade. On the roof is a cafe, partially open, with views of the bridge, opera house, and harbour.
Interior
When used by the Maritime Services Board the interior made extensive use of scagliola and terrazzo to imitate marble flooring and walls, a common technique at the time. A war memorial and associated artwork were also included. These features remain in what was known as Wharfage Hall, the two-story lobby at the building's central entrance. Today, adapted for use as a museum, much of the interior is now gallery space with plain white walls, concrete floor, and high ceilings. The fourth story's offices have been retained for the museum administration.
History 1798–1942: Prior history of site
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia is located south of the landing spot of the First Fleet. The site originally housed two Commissariat Stores, built using convict labour. The state government assumed control of the Commissariat Stores in 1901 and leased them to commercial tenants. In 1937, the Circular Quay Planning Committee, which had originally recommended the buildings be demolished to provide parkland, changed its mind and called for them to be replaced with a new office for the Maritime Services Board (MSB), which had been displaced by the Circular Quay Railway.
Demolition was completed in 1939. Originally the committee had considered holding a competition for the new building's design, but by then it had decided to use the MSB's own architects. One, William Henry Withers, designed a Stripped Classical building for the agency, with a central tower meant to echo the pylons of the nearby bridge. After site clearance construction was halted in late 1940 since restrictions resulting from the onset of World War II made continued work impossible. The building was resumed in late 1944 with the erection of its steel frame and the offices were opened eight years later by Premier Joseph Cahill. It is listed on both the Register of the National Estate and the New South Wales State Heritage Register.
1943–1991: Power Gallery of Contemporary Art
The MCA's roots are in the 1943 will of Australian expatriate artist JW Power (1881–1943), the first Australian-born painter to experiment with Cubism. Independently wealthy from his previous medical career, he specified that upon his wife's death, his personal fortune, mostly stock worth £A2 million (A$ today), was to go to his alma mater, the University of Sydney, with the express purpose of informing and educating Australians in the contemporary visual arts. It was to be used specifically for "museums and other places for the purpose ... of suitably housing the works purchased so as to bring the people of Australia in more direct touch with the latest art developments in other countries."
When Powell's wife died in 1961, the bequest was made public; she also willed most of her husband's works to the university. At the time it was the largest monetary bequest ever made to any Australian university or arts organisation. Four years later the university's senate voted to create the Power Institute of Fine Arts as a beginning of fulfilling Power's wishes.
In December 1970 the University of Sydney also received the Seymour Bequest for the purposes of a performing arts centre, and sought to combine the two bequests into an arts complex that would include within it the Seymour Centre and the Power Institute facilities, including a home for the Power Gallery. It was opened in 1975 as just a performing arts venue.
This collection of artworks took the form of the 'Power Gallery of Contemporary Art', a traveling collection without a permanent address. Between John Power's death and the eventual establishment of the museum, the collection was mainly housed in the University of Sydney's Fisher Library during the 1970s. It was exhibited in the Madsen Building on campus between 1980 and 1989.
1991–1999: Museum of Contemporary Art
After the relocation of the Maritime Services Board (MSB) to larger premises in 1989, the building and site were donated by the Government of New South Wales to the Museum of Contemporary Art. Funded by the University of Sydney and the Power Bequest, restoration, and refurbishment of the building commenced in 1990 under the direction of Andrew Anderson of Peddle Thorp/John Holland Interiors, and the following year the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, officially opened.
Those early years in the museum's own space were difficult. The university agreed to help fund the museum's initial costs but did not make any commitment to the long term, as it was expected that the museum would eventually become financially independent. To that end an admission fee was charged; it did not make up for the shortfall as the university began phasing out its support, and the local and national media began expressing concern for the museum's future. Newspaper stories called attention to the paucity of visitors and called the museum "a place for wankers".