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The Berndt Museum in partnership with the School of Design at The University of Western Australia will announce the prizes of its Design Ideas Competition on Tuesday 5 December at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

The Design Ideas Competition was opened for staff and students at UWA to come up with concepts and ideas for a building to house the Berndt Museum collection, one of the world’s finest and most important collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural material and knowledge: works of art, objects, archives, film, audio recordings and photographs.

This original Berndt collection was donated to the University in 1976. However the collection has never has a museum of its own and is currently housed in a temporary facility under UWA’s Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

The purpose of the competition is to ignite the imagination, to refocus on the need for a permanent home for the Berndt Museum collection and to act as an inspiring teaching tool for architecture and design students and staff at UWA.

The competition sought proposals that demonstrated clear links between country and community, between collections and visitors, and between students and the world.  Entrants were asked to focus on four major contextual frameworks including the Cultural Context, University Context, Community Context and Campus Context. Students and staff were invited to design an inspired and functional museum facility that can house, protect, conserve and display the Berndt collections in their entirety.

A $15,000 prize pool will be spread across entries best meeting the objectives of the brief. All entries will be available for public viewing on Tuesday 5 December between 11.00am – 5.00pm in UWA’s Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

Media references

David Stacey (UWA Media Manager) (+61 8) 6488 3229 / (+61 4) 32 637 716