Australian National Maritime Museum

Ship Shape

Controls are good because you have to work with them,” declares James Perry from the deck of HMAS Vampire, a 118-metre Destroyer at anchor in Sydney Harbour. He could be a naval captain extolling the character-building benefits of the tightly confined maritime life on board the ship, or its submarine counterpart, Onslow, moored nearby.

Instead, Perry – an architect at Francis Jones Morehen Thorp (FJMT) – is referring to a slither of steel that sits between the two vessels, a twisting pavilion complete with a control panel that is the latest building in a series that collectively make up the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANNM) in Darling Harbour. It’s been some time since Vampire and Onslow saw active service, but their essential characteristics continue to impose constraints on those who work with them. Perhaps only an architect could see those limitations in such a positive light.

And controls there were-aplenty on this project. A skinny pier with minimal access in one of Sydney’s busiest precincts. Zero scope to put services beneath the building. An iconic parent building just to the west – a Bicentennial Philip Cox no less. A tight budget. Multiple stakeholders. Some might argue that this is standard fare for architects, living as they do in the extreme problem-solving world that is design. The ANMM Waterfront Pavilion, however, takes those challenges to new levels, fitting tightly as it does between two large, hard objects that are constantly moving, side to side with the currents and wind, and up and down with the tide.

Vampire and Onslow – decommissioned in 1986 and 1999 respectively – have been in situ at Darling Harbour for more than a decade. They form a key part of Sydney’s Maritime Museum experience in that they provide visitors with access to the defence ship and submarine environments, taking the conceptual premise of museum exhibits to a tangible, real-world level. Serviced for many years by a temporary ticket booth and nothing more, the museum guardians engaged FJMT via a selected tendering process to deliver a permanent access facility. The brief sought a building that moderated the physical space between the vessels externally, and that enhanced the onboard experience with appropriate interactive displays internally.

“The museum board was visionary about what they wanted and was very supportive,” says Perry. “This building needed to have its own identity but at the same time not overwhelm either the submarine or the warship.”

Preliminary discussions led to a design premise that ensured the building could occupy its place and respect the main maritime building, but more than anything it had to respond to the vessels. It’s ironic, then, that two such clinically engineered and man-made entities are the controls to such an organic shape, a stretched pipe rhythmically punctuated by vertically ridged segments. The form distorts at its middle, physically submitting in shape to the conning tower of the submarine and the bridge of the destroyer. This deferential nod to the sea craft produces a dynamic and elegant structure from every angle and distance.

“We started with a tube and then looked at the way you could articulate that tube, which brought a few things into play,” says Perry. “It was about building material selection, it was about scale, it was about having some height and understanding the profile of these two vessels. They’re not flat – they have scale and they have variation. The building is almost pinched at the top, and that was as a result of that form development. The fifth elevation was also paramount because all those significant corporate buildings on the city fringe look back on this building. We needed a roof profile  that was incredibly neat.”

From the outset, product selection was key to providing that neat roof solution. The design required a building material that could meet the light-weight structural requirements of the project and its tight budget, while also meeting the aspirations the architects had for the architectural facade. Working to the mantra that controls can lead to beneficial outcomes, FJMT looked to Kingspan’s BENCHMARK Evolution insulated wall panels made from corrosion-resistant COLORBOND^® Ultra steel in the colour Woodland Grey^® to meet the very particular demands of their design thinking.

“What was great about the Kingspan product was the way it worked to a modular-type approach,” says Perry. “We were looking for something that we could clad the whole building in without having a whole series of horizontal joints. The Kingspan BENCHMARK Evolution panels’ structural properties allowed us to have incredibly long panels, up to six or seven metres long, which gave us basically one continuous long panel from ground level to the roof, and it also worked effectively as an interface with the glass.”

The regularity of the panel joins most obviously reference the ribbed hulls of ships, but it’s a steel motif that also recalls, at a more subliminal level, the patterning produced by water.

“Very early on we looked at some key things – one of them was water and how it ripples and sets a repetitive pattern. That gave us a clue about how we might profile the building, because you could have just done a sleek tube; you could imagine it all as vertical faces but that would have been really uninteresting and so we developed this idea of a repetition of elements and how that might develop into a building.”

The BENCHMARK Evolution wall panels made from COLORBOND^® Ultra steel in the colour Woodland Grey^® lent themselves well to the project and achieving the desired staggered- panel effect. FJMT had employed such vertical patterning for internal applications in the past, but this project was for it the first instance of its application as an external facade.

“With interior panelling you have a bit more freedom about doing what you want to do, but externally it was quite a challenge,” says Perry. “We worked really closely with the builder and Kingspan to work through all those complexities, particularly when you have panels rotating and what that means for waterproofing .”

The clients are delighted with the pavilion, an outcome the architects attribute to the dialogue and collaboration with the vessels’ naval custodians, who were actively engaged in the early design meetings and provided invaluable insight and advice. Perry finds much satisfaction in many aspects of the project but singles out the architectural facade for special mention.

“For me the north and south elevation are probably my favourite parts of the building because they do everything we hoped they would,” says Perry. “I love the way it has ended up working with the two vessels. The facade has to deal with and do a lot of things and, in this context, it is the quiet innovation of the project. If the facade  had just one big panel it would have had such a different effect and impact than what has been achieved here with the panels rotating.”

How apt, then, that the main controls of the project – Vampire, Onslow, tide and current – continue to work with the Pavilion post-construction. Every day they have a different conversation with the facade, as moving water and vessels reflect on the panels, producing fine shifts and gradations in the appearance of the building. A beautiful reminder too that limitations can be seen in a positive light.