Challenge

It is important to preserve our heritage buildings by using them. However, they were all built in times with different standards for construction, fire safety and access and were intended for a different purpose. What was built as a secure storage unit for Fairfax newspapers, has had a life as a naval training building (thus the name ‘The Gunnery’) will now be re-purposed as an exemplar place for making, talking about and exhibiting contemporary art.

Response

The Gunnery building is a dignified harbourside bond warehouse built between 1906-11.  It could be described as introverted, confident, pragmatic and muscular. Artspace is a gregarious, extroverted, engaging, and challenging art gallery that has grown out of a raucous and provocative artists’ squat that occupied the Gunnery through the 70’s and 80’s. The challenge, and the joy, of this project comes from this unlikely pairing — heritage, conservation, protection, with provocation, inspiration, and continual change.

Though when you consider that it was the artist/squatters that saved The Gunnery from demolition by lobbying for the building to be heritage listed, it is clear that they are each other’s reasons for existing, and so the pairing is a partnership, and we used this as inspiration for our work.