Powerhouse Parramatta museum construction, May 2026. Image © Rory Gardiner
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https://www.archdaily.com/1183902/oma-amo-and-open-architecture-design-opening-exhibitions-for-powerhouse-parramatta-in-sydney-australia
Powerhouse Parramatta, a new museum and cultural institution on the banks of the Parramatta River in Western Sydney, Australia, will open to the public on Saturday, November 7, 2026. The 30,000-square-meter building has been designed by Franco-Japanese firm Moreau Kusunoki as lead designer, with Australian firm Genton as local architect and Arup as engineer. Moreau Kusunoki won the design competition for the project in 2019, with completion initially planned for 2025. Powerhouse Parramatta is the first state cultural organization located in Western Sydney, a region whose population includes communities from more than 170 countries. At opening, the museum will present five exhibitions.
Powerhouse Parramatta museum construction, May 2026. Image © Rory Gardiner
The museum has been organized around seven Presentation Spaces, each with a distinct layout intended to accommodate a changing program of exhibitions. The building also includes retail spaces, cafés and restaurants, and several dedicated facilities: a residential learning program designed to host 10,000 students per year; a space for programming related to food history, culture, science, and technology; a rooftop observatory; an “Indigenous garden”; and residential apartments for up to 30 researchers, academics, and industry or community leaders in residence. Powerhouse Parramatta is part of Powerhouse, Australia’s largest museum group. Powerhouse Parramatta forms part of an infrastructure renewal program that also includes the redevelopment of Powerhouse Ultimo, expanded facilities at Powerhouse Castle Hill, and ongoing heritage restoration work at Sydney Observatory.
Powerhouse Parramatta museum construction, May 2026. Image © Rory Gardiner
Powerhouse Parramatta museum construction, May 2026. Image © Rory Gardiner
The opening exhibition program at Powerhouse Parramatta will present more than 3,000 objects, including 1,600 drawn from the Powerhouse Collection alongside loans from national and international institutions. The program includes more than 45 new commissions from artists and designers across 14 countries, among them seven Community Commissions developed with First Nations practitioners. Two of the five opening exhibitions, Task Eternal and The Mall, have been designed in collaboration with architecture practices OPEN Architecture and OMA/AMO.
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Task Eternal, designed by OPEN Architecture, traces the history of human flight, from First Nations sky knowledges and early aviation to contemporary aerospace technology. Drawing on Ted Chiang’s short story The Tower of Babylon, the exhibition presents more than 850 objects, with loans from NASA, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the British Museum, MIT, and the Australian Space Agency. Among the objects on display is the “black box” flight recorder, a device originally developed in Australia to record aircraft data. The exhibition also includes James Turrell‘s Shangri La (Over the Hump) (2026), an immersive installation using cycles of changing color across the gallery space.
James Turrell, Shangri La (Over the Hump) 2026. Immersive Light Installation View. Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, 2017. Photographers Yang Jiaxi, Zhu Zhe. Image Courtesy of Long Museum, Shanghai
Apollo Command Moduel Boilerplate #1224. Transferred from NASA to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum L5797.2.. Image Courtesy of Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
The Mall, developed by OMA/AMO, led by David Gianotten, Gabriel Duarte, and Sylvia Chan, examines the shopping mall as an architectural and urban typology, looking at how malls have both absorbed and generated changes in urban life, technology, and patterns of consumption. Its point of departure is Western Sydney’s retail history, including Westfield Parramatta, at one point Australia’s largest shopping mall, and the region’s role in developing a transport-integrated retail model later applied elsewhere. Installed within a black-box gallery, the exhibition is organized around five thematic nodes, Desire, Arcade, Transaction, Ideal City, and Forum, each assigned a distinct spatial geometry derived from OMA/AMO’s research into 101 malls worldwide. The nodes are arranged without a fixed sequence on a continuous ground plane referencing the suburban parking lot, allowing visitors to move between them non-linearly.
“The Mall” exhibition diagram, 2026. Image Courtesy of OMA
Ayoung Kim, Still from Dancer in the Mirror Field, co-commissioned with M+, Hong Kong, 2025. Image © Ayoung Kim
The exhibition draws on more than 560 objects from the Powerhouse Collection and international loans, together with 18 new commissions. Among the objects included are the archive of architect Victor Gruen, an early designer of the enclosed shopping mall in the United States; material on Australian brands originating from beach, skate, and street culture; a co-commission with M+ in Hong Kong featuring South Korean artist Ayoung Kim; archival loans from Levi’s, Nike, Patagonia, Speedo, and Woolworths; and a new installation by Vert Design reinterpreting the Roselands Raindrop Fountain in southwest Sydney. The exhibition is accompanied by five publications described by OMA/AMO as “bookazines,” positioned between exhibition catalogue and magazine format.
“The Mall” exhibition diagram, 2026. Image Courtesy of OMA
In Norway, the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2026 announced its program for its ninth edition under the theme “What if Nature Comes First?”. The event will take place from September 17 to October 1 at Sofienberg Church in Oslo in a two-week festival format. OPEN Architecture recently designed Lina Bo Bardi’s first exhibition in China at the PSA contemporary art museum in Huangpu, while OMA, led by partner Jason Long, together with San Francisco-based Y.A. Studio, completed 730 Stanyan, a mixed-use affordable housing development in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.