WA Museum Boola Bardip

WA Museum Boola Bardip — "many stories" in Nyoongar language — is a $400 million museum designed by Hassell and OMA, completed in November 2020 in Perth's Cultural Centre. The project involves the renovation and integration of six heritage-listed buildings with a new contemporary structure: a large glass volume that appears to float above the historic fabric on a series of legs, creating generous covered public space beneath it. The architectural strategy is fundamentally urban: rather than building a single large object, Hassell + OMA created a porous campus in which old and new coexist through a series of voids, galleries, and covered interior streets. The Contemporary Museum building — orthogonal, glass-screened, suspended — extends the Cultural Centre's pedestrian network and activates the historic precinct from above. Inside, the programme is organised around the history and natural environment of Western Australia: galleries covering First Nations culture, natural history, science, maritime exploration, and WA's colonial and contemporary story. The spatial quality varies between the renovated heritage rooms — intimate, detailed, historically charged — and the new galleries, which are larger and more flexible. The most compelling moments occur where old and new are in dialogue: where a contemporary gallery opens onto a heritage courtyard, or where the architecture of the building and the history of the collection occupy the same space. The museum is free to enter and sits within a precinct that includes the Art Gallery of WA, the State Library, and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts — making it the natural centrepiece of an afternoon in the Cultural Centre. Worth visiting for both the collection and the architecture of the new building.