Powerhouse Parramatta to Open in Western Sydney in 2025

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Australian museum group Powerhouse Sydney is spending AUD $1.4 billion (US $920 million) on the development of a new museum complex in the western Sydney suburb of Parramatta.

Powerhouse Parramatta will feature seven exhibition spaces alongside learning and digital studios, a cinema, an 800-seat theatre, a rooftop garden, restaurants and cafés when it opens in 2025.

‘Simultaneously a centre for production, display and learning, we will celebrate the dynamic shift in how Sydney thinks about itself, its culture and its communities,’ said Lisa Havilah, Chief Executive of Powerhouse Sydney.

The Powerhouse is a group of museums owned by the New South Wales State Government. It evolved from the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum of New South Wales, which was established in 1879.

The Powerhouse Collection contains over 500,000 items from the realms of science, technology, design and applied arts that are deemed significant to Australian heritage. They include a 1950s Catalina seaplane, a dress Nicole Kidman wore in the Baz Luhrmann film Moulin Rouge! (2001), and a set of samurai armour.

Powerhouse Board of Trustees President Peter Collins said Powerhouse Parramatta would be ‘Australia’s very own Smithsonian’.

Powerhouse also presents contemporary art. Yuki Kihara‘s Paradise Camp(2022), which New Zealand presented at the 59th Venice Biennale, is showing at Powerhouse Ultimo through 31 December 2023.

Havilah directed Campbelltown Arts Centre from 2005–2011 and Carriageworks from 2012–2018, both of which have strong emphases on contemporary art, before taking on her role at Powerhouse Sydney.

Plans for Powerhouse Parramatta have drawn a number of criticisms, including objections to the destruction of heritage buildings in Willow Grove and St George Terraces, concerns that the riverside site is prone to flooding, and accusations from a New South Wales upper house inquiry that the institution is an entertainment centre ‘masquerading’ as a museum.

Dissents in the inquiry’s report said the flood risk was exaggerated, and the amount of space dedicated to commercial use was comparable to that of the Sydney Modern Project and Hong Kong’s M+.

Items from the Powerhouse collection will show at Powerhouse Ultimo in central Sydney in the exhibition 1001 Remarkable Objects from 26 August 2023. —[O]

Main image: Artist impression, Powerhouse Paramatta, designed by Moreau Kusunoki and Genton. © Moreau Kusunoki.