Check out the underground museum
The desert moonscape of Lightning Ridge is the perfect backdrop for a $34 million energy-efficient underground museum and café at the Australian Opal Centre.
Pritzker Prize-winning architect Glenn Murcutt and Wendy Lewin have designed a two-storey building on the Three Mile opal field that will be entirely off the grid, self-regulating for temperature and humidity, and self-sufficient for power and water.
“The building is pretty much autonomous,” Murcutt says.
“The building will have its own waste management and water supply, and we will develop our own power.
“We had the possibility to tap into Great Artesian Basin which we can use for warming the building in winter. It’s a self-sustaining building – it has to be.”
The museum is expected to become a subterranean study site for UNSW architecture students and design professionals, as well as a centre for research, science, art, tourism and cultural activities in one of the state’s most disadvantaged but culturally diverse regions.
Murcutt, who has been running a regional studio for third-year UNSW Architecture students for 12 years, says many of the study sites chosen, including Lightning Ridge and Kemspey, have extreme climatic variations.
“Students can’t design buildings that just pump out ordinary air-conditioning into buildings. It’s a great challenge for students to use less energy,” he says.
UNSW students from the Faculty of Engineering have been involved, with photovoltaics and solar energy graduate Han Gao completing a thesis in photovoltaic power opportunities to supply energy to the building.
According to Lewin, the building is supported by malqafs – an ancient passive ventilating and cooling system used widely in arid areas of the Middle East.
“Malqafs promote air movement by ‘catching’ prevailing breezes through ventilated walls,” she says.
Visitors will be able to descend into the opal mines through the subterranean spaces, with roughly 5 per cent embedded in the earth.
Site preparation and excavation is now finished and the museum is expected to be completed in 2020.