Overflow Powerhouse Parramatta

Walking on Water

Inside the immense, naturally lit museum interior, visitors remove their shoes and enter a tidal plane of water across a sculpted outcrop of 300-million-year-old Sydney sandstone. The conventional relationship between visitor and exhibition evaporates. Adults hesitate at the water’s edge. Children enter and play. People slow down. Bodies change direction. Visiting becomes dwelling.

The design seeks to fill the vast room whilst leaving it empty, giving the space back to light, water and stone. Water is the surface through which the exhibition is experienced, physically changing the visitor’s relationship with space. Water catches the architecture in reflection. Daylight moves across its surface. The tide grows until the pool becomes a mirror plane, then recedes to leave thousands of traces across the undulating stone. It shifts and collapses scale, at once a single pool and a vast topography.

A deep terrain of water

Parramatta has always been a deep terrain of Water Country, where salt water from the coast and fresh water from inland meet in brackish diversity. This was the Water Country of the Barramattagal. Over tens of thousands of years, the Parramatta River deposited and reworked a vast terrain of sand across the transition from sandstone to shale. Aboriginal people inhabited this changing landscape while water continued to reshape it, leaving traces of occupation within the accumulating terrain. The river was not a fixed line. Water moved in all dimensions, through sand, sediment and rock across a terrain whose limits were never absolute.

The image of the river

Elizabeth Macquarie brought British landscape pattern books to the colony and was closely involved in reshaping the Government Domain according to Picturesque principles: sweeping lawns, composed views, clumps of trees, serpentine lakes and water features.

From Government House, landscape, architecture, vegetation and river were increasingly composed as a picture. In 1818 a weir was ordered across the changing river flow to exclude the tide and retain freshwater. It provided a more reliable water supply, but also transformed a tidal brackish watercourse into a more static body of fresh water. A dynamic water terrain became a Picturesque river, both infrastructure and image.

Successive interventions sought greater control through further weirs, engineered banks and eventually concrete channels. Tidal movement was altered and riverbanks increasingly defined. An ancient landscape characterised by dynamism gradually acquired a fixed form. The visible channel became synonymous with the river itself: land on one side, water on the other, divided by an apparently definitive line called the riverbank.

The river’s terrain

Directly beneath the river, the larger terrain of water and the living memory of its occupation remains. Sand, stone, alluvium and groundwater extend beneath the contemporary city. What appears in plan as a clearly bounded river becomes much less certain in section. The riverbank defines the visible channel. It does not define the river’s terrain. When the river periodically floods, the distinction between river and land dissolves. Flood is the moment when water Country is revealed.

Design makes Water Country perceptible

Tyrrell Studio’s design seeks to make this larger terrain perceptible at all times. It inverts the logic of the Picturesque. Rather than using design to create a naturalised image, it allows water, geology, vegetation, weather and time to act upon the order of the public domain. Water is encouraged to pool where it would usually be engineered to drain. Alluvium gathers in stone and vegetation interrupts the civic surface. Rain changes the landscape. Precisely cut sandstone gives way to rough, pre-weathered edges that will continue to change with water and time. The design is less interested in representing the river than in allowing the forces of the river to act upon the landscape.

Water carries knowledge

Films made with communities and cultural organisations connected to Water Country across New South Wales bring voices, places, knowledge and cultural practices into the museum. Images fall across the water, break apart across ripples and reform across stone and the bodies of people standing within it. Visitors stand barefoot in water over ancient stone on the top floor of a building in Parramatta while stories of Water Country from elsewhere swim around them. Water becomes simultaneously the subject of the films, the material of the exhibition and the surface through which those stories enter the room.

Water Country moves from the Parramatta River, through the riverfront and into the museum. Stories of Water Country from across New South Wales move through film and light towards Parramatta. They meet in the water of Overflow. The river exceeds its banks, rain remains within stone, vegetation breaks through the constructed surface, mist rises into the morning atmosphere, landscape enters architecture, images escape their screens through reflection. Stories from elsewhere enter this water in Parramatta. The physical setting is intensely particular: water, stone, light, bodies, Parramatta. But the system to which it belongs is vast. Water finds no boundaries between river, landscape, architecture, image and body. This is Overflow.