Looking to the future, not just the past, is new vision for Auckland Museum
Aucklanders will get the chance to debate the city’s big issues as changes come to its ‘ living room’.
An $85 million transformation project under way at Auckland Museum will provide interactive forums for people to discuss and debate the big issues facing the city such as climate change and the future place of cars in the city.
The museum’s chief executive Dr David Gaimster says one of the projects in development will create a new suite of galleries all about Auckland called Tamaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland.
The galleries will feature a new Future Tamaki City public laboratory which will act “as a barometer for Aucklanders to express their views on things like the protection of the environment, education and housing.
“It will be a weather station for the city,” he says. “We are the living room of Auckland and have been at its heart since its beginnings; no other institution can do this.”
Tamaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland, which will explore Auckland’s past, present and future, is one of a number of transformational developments planned for completion in 2020 at the museum’s heritage building which is soon to celebrate the 90th anniversary of its Pukekawa location in Auckland Domain.
Gaimster says the project includes a new South Atrium entrance and foyer, a new Learning Base with classrooms, new eastern and western walkways on the ground floor to make it easier for people to get around, and a new orientation, hospitality and retail hub with improved dining and café offerings.
Gaimster is confident the transformed visitor experience will attract increased numbers of people through the museum’s doors each year. Almost one million people visited in 2018 and Gaimster anticipates this number will rise to 1.2 million annually once the project is complete.
“We are also going to be in a better position to shift the dwell time (how long people stay) from two hours to between three and four hours, ” he says.
The transformation includes a new Special Exhibitions suite (currently showing the Voyage to Aotearoa: Tupaia and the Endeavour and Carried Away: Bags Unpacked exhibitions) enabling the museum to bring major international exhibitions to Auckland. The Te Ara Oranga (Southern Pathway) in the nearby Auckland Domain provides, for the first time, an accessible route from the museum’s south entry to Parnell.
Gaimster says the project, which is driven by changes to the ground floor, is part of the museum’s Five Year Strategic plan adopted in 2017. “This acknowledges that as Auckland changes, the museum must too; it is our roadmap for how we will evolve to meet the needs of a growing, changing and increasingly diverse Auckland.
“More public space will be created, the special exhibition space enlarged, galleries will be refurbished and a hospitality hub will encourage visitors to make the museum a destination, meet friends and enjoy a meal.”
He says the digital revolution is both the reason for and the enabler of the transformation. He says the way audiences are engaging with the museum is changing, they want a more interactive experience and to voice their opinions on issues facing the city and society in general.
“We are competing for people’s leisure time with places like the new mall at Newmarket,” he says. “In the past we have created exhibitions that, in some cases, remain unchanged for years and people would think ‘I’ve been to the museum, why should I come back’?
“Now with the new exhibition halls we will have the ability to create a higher frequency of changing exhibits each year, which is game-changing for Auckland.”
Work on the new Stories of Auckland suite is being undertaken with the help of a $4.5 million grant from the Lottery Grants Board Significant Projects Fund.