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Home Topics History & Culture Underground art museum protects works from natural disaster

If you stand still, alone, inside the gallery of the Bundanon Art Museum you’ll experience a special kind of silence. There’s no tooting of car horns or raindrops on rooftops, not even white noise. That’s because this building is embedded in the side of a hill and perfectly soundproofed by great sods of earth.

The gallery houses some of the nation’s most precious artworks, produced by Arthur Boyd during the mid to latter part of the 20th century when he lived and painted in his two-storey sandstone homestead and nearby studio.

In 1993 Boyd and his wife, Yvonne, gifted the 1000ha property and artwork to the public, driven by a vision to create a cultural institution for artistic enjoyment and learning in the Shoalhaven region of New South Wales.

Before the gallery opened in early 2022, Boyd’s artworks were housed in storerooms across Sydney after being hastily removed from the homestead and studio as the Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20 blazed towards the property. 

The fires that ravaged so much of the NSW south coast that season came scarily close to consuming Boyd’s paintings, and with just one road in and out of the heavily wooded property, action was instigated to ensure the artworks could be returned but never be at risk from fire again.

Enter architect Kerstin Thompson, whose team has created a fusion of landscape and art.

“The design is driven by Bundanon’s main imperative, as established by the Boyd family, to foster an appreciation for and understanding of landscape and art,” Kerstin says. 

“We have placed the site’s ecology at the centre of the design, with the new suite of buildings and landscapes responding to Bundanon as both subject and site of Arthur Boyd’s work, seeking to heighten the visitor’s appreciation for the sights, sounds, textures and ecological workings of the landscape.”

The suite of buildings Kerstin refers to includes The Bridge. At 160m in length, it spans a natural gully in the sloping hillside, “with inspiration drawn from rural Australia’s trestle flood bridges”, Kerstin explains.

Designed as accommodation for up to 64 guests and with a creative learning centre and break-out spaces, it has expansive views over the Shoalhaven River.

Both The Bridge and the gallery are designed to accommodate current and future climatic conditions, including bushfires and floods: on a rainy day it’s easy to see the latter in action, rainwater flowing down the gully beneath the elongated legs of The Bridge and towards the river. 

In preparation for building the art museum (the gallery and its Collection Store), approximately 4500m3 of cut material (soil and rock) was removed from the hillside and then reinstated once the structure was complete. 

Its subterranean nature, and a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system, offers a stable temperature and humidity for the space. Twenty-seven 100m-deep geothermal bores (located underneath The Bridge) power this system. 

Further to this, the concrete roof of the art museum is swathed in native plantings, below which sits 300–500mm of soil, a drainage cell, insulation and waterproof membrane. There is also an air void behind the building separating the back wall from the damp soil.

To improve bushfire resistance, the only exposed wall (the front entrance) is forged from solid concrete and punctuated with steel-framed double-glazed windows with layers made up of bushfire-resistant glass and high-performance thermal glass. The outer skin of the museum is constructed of 250mm-thick solid concrete walls; inside, there’s a 260mm-thick timber-framed insulated wall with plywood backing and plasterboard lining for hanging art.

According to Bundanon’s Beatrice Spence, the completion of the state-of-the-art museum assures the future of Boyd’s collection – some 1448 works by Arthur Boyd, along with works by contemporaries such as Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Joy Hester and Charles Blackman – and an archive of books, scripts and compositions created by artists while in residence at Bundanon before the redevelopment.

The museum is also the final realisation of Boyd’s vision for his beloved property – to be a centre for creative arts and education, for scientific research and a place to explore landscape and engage with First Nations history and culture.  

Indeed, the subterranean gallery and Collection Store, and The Bridge, are like broad and beautiful brushstrokes in a Boyd masterpiece – a shared and sublimely beautiful space for artists, writers, musicians, dancers, performers, scholars, students, creative souls and lovers of nature in the Shoalhaven.

Building the $34 million Bundanon Art Museum was a masterclass in environmental design.

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