Vision for a new museum in the Female Factory and Institutions Precinct
Client: Sydney Living Museums
Location: Sydney, Australia
Year: 2022
Seeding a landscape of stories in a new museum
Brief
Sydney Living Museums (SLM) developed an exciting opportunity to create a new museum at the Female Factory and Institutions Precinct in the Parramatta North Heritage Core. The visioning process included museum master planning visioning, visitor mapping, assessment of site opportunities and constraints, initial experience concepts and benchmarking, informed by audience research and stakeholder engagement.
Approach
This site is complex both architecturally and emotionally, with stories of resistance and hope cutting through lived (and surviving) experiences of institutional abuse and trauma. The vision needed to consider these challenges amid a fragmented operational environment (with some tenants already allocated) to create an engaging yet sensitive visitor experience. Left Bank Co. assembled a multidisciplinary team and facilitated multiple workshops in quick succession to build a comprehensive Museum Vision in close collaboration with SLM. Together we crafted an innovative model for a new museum to be inserted into the site.
Impact
The museum experience will ignite interest in and make visible the many narratives and experiences of control, care, and connection that have shaped the Female Factory and Institutions precinct at North Parramatta. The visioning process for the new museum re-drew the boundaries of the traditional museum to include a centralised museum experience that tells the story of the whole precinct and a ‘landscape of stories’ that is made of experiences dotted throughout the precinct, within specific enclosed spaces and integrated into the landscape. This report was a precursor piece of work to the master plan and the Final Business Case.