Still a powerful museum experience

Not just a science museum, Ultimo's Powerhouse Museum is the main site of the Museum of Arts and Sciences. It's housed in the old powerhouse building of the electric tram system, and it's quite an institution.

As well as science and technology, it deals with transport, decorative arts, design, media, communication, and lots more. A visit is quite an education.

I first visited the Powerhouse in the 1980s, shortly after it was rehoused in its current spectacular lodgings. I've been back once or twice, and last week it was time to catch up with it once more. It might be the last time too, with much talk of its impending destruction and/or exile to Parramatta and/or duplication. Who knows what the final outcome will be, but the State Government seems to have all kinds of secretive plans for it, all probably involving wins for property developers and losses for us, the public.

Among the probably immovable exhibits is the enormous Boulton-Watt steam engine, said to be the oldest working rotative one in the world.

There's even a nice little corner devoted to space exploration. It includes a section of International Space Station mock-up, which pretends to rotate around you, giving you a very disorienting experience to simulate, sort of, not knowing up from down, as you wouldn't.


And there's the obligatory section of hands-on science education exhibits, like the 'Zap the plasma ball' Van de Graaff machine.

The Goods Line

In New York they've got the High Line - a disused piece of elevated railway track that's now a very popular linear park. Well in Sydney we've now got the Goods Line. It's a similar concept. It's not as long or as elevated, but it's a nice little creation all the same.

It too follows an old freight line - through Ultimo, and it connects the pedestrian tunnel along the southern end of Central Station with Darling Harbour and the Powerhouse Museum. It extends the current walkway which passes the ABC building and UTS.

There are historic references and information boards, there are flower gardens, and lots of whimsical little touches like the solid iron chairs and table tennis tables.


I also found it the perfect spot to take in the full majesty of the Frank Gehry designed 'crumpled paper bag' building of the UTS Business School, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building.

Illuminating stroll through Ultimo

I heard there was an amazing piece of installation art on show for a few days, in a disused railway tunnel in Ultimo. I headed into town and checked it out. The most amazing thing about it was that neither I nor any of the other visitors there at the time seemed to have a clue what it was about or what message, if any, the artist was attempting to convey.

There were lots of old style sideboard cabinets and glass boxes on tables, with various odd things in them. As you walked around, lights and sounds might or might not come on. I'm very patient with my art. I give it every possible benefit of the doubt. But New York based Australian artist, Ian Burns, was stretching it to the limit with his 'Extended Stage'.

There again, the explanatory pamphlet probably knows what it's talking about. The exhibition's a piece of magic, and it intertwines unexpected phenomena with a wry mix of new media and nostalgia. It draws on the atmosphere and history of this overlooked site, and it creates moments of small spectacle around a rare opportunity for the viewer to explore an unusual space, in the end creating a spectacle of the process of investigation itself. He has a sense of the sublime, and he is preoccupied with exploring that revealing moment when we experience the beautiful and the
ridiculous at the same time. I'd obviously missed all this somehow. See http://newsroom.uts.edu.au/news/2014/04/artist-creates-illuminating-experience-old-tunnel

I spent a couple of hours exploring Ultimo a little further, and found there's lots more than this going on. There was the Hanging Gardens building, there was the ABC, and there was Ultimo TAFE. There was UTS (the University of Technology), with one of the candidates for ugliest building in Sydney (the original UTS tower building), and what may soon be the most interesting building in the country (the Frank Gehrey designed Business School building, called the Dr Chau Chak Wing building, and resembling a giant crumpled cardboard box treehouse thing). I've included a picture, stolen from the UTS website, of what it'll look like when it's finished.


There was the refurbished site of the old Carlton United brewery, with a sparkling new shopping centre, brave bold sculptures, and the completely-new-to-me Central Park (also seemingly called Chippendale Green). One of the Broadway buildings alongside Central Park - the Hanging Gardens building in fact - has a strange horizontal platform sticking out at the the top, with a bunch of mirror reflectors presumably doing something useful somewhere below. I must look this up. I just did. It's a 'cantilevered heliostat, directing light into the complex and becoming a digital artwork at night'. Wow! The Sydney Architecture Archive blog ( http://sydneyarchitecturearchive.wordpress.com/category/buildings/contemporary/uts-gehry/ ) tells me that there are in fact three buildings in this area that are Pritzker Prize winners.

I don't really understand my architecture much better than my art installations, but I often like it a lot more. I decided I rather like Ultimo.

I was going to tell you the story of how Ultimo got its name. Must look it up again. Here it is, lifted straight out of Wikipedia. It's a good story.
           'Ultimo' was originally the name of the estate of Dr John Harris, on 34 acres (140,000 m²) granted to him by Governor King in 1803. It was named for a clerical error in a legal case against Harris that had prevented him being court-martialled. His offence was listed as 'ultimo' (having occurred in the previous month) when it should have been cited as 'instant' (having occurred in the same month). Harris Street is named in his honour.