Te waihanganga o tō koutou whare taonga hou The making of your new Museum

Your New Museum

The new Museum will be a world-class visitor attraction with the best of the old and many new surprises. It will have:

• Base-isolation across much of the site, protecting people and the Museum collection. Major touring exhibitions will have the confidence to return to the city.
• Vastly improved and welcoming visitor facilities, including gathering spaces, cafes, lifts that work and more toilets.
• 50% more exhibition space than the old Museum. This will allow us to display much more of the collection and to change out exhibitions more often. Many of the 2.3 million treasures in the collection haven’t been seen by the public for many years, if ever.
• Enable mana whenua to tell their own stories and bring bicultural design into the new visitor experience.
• Large, climate-controlled, accessible basement storage to care for and protect irreplaceable collection objects that tell the history of Waitaha Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Antarctica.
• Dedicated teaching space for schools and a community space for education and public programmes.

Creating a world-class Museum

Athfield Architects Director Trevor Watt describes the exciting redevelopment of Canterbury Museum.

Trevor has designed some of the most significant buildings in Christchurch, including Jade Stadium and Hagley Oval, and has been working on the Museum project since the year 2000.

Here, Trevor explains how the redevelopment will restore our heritage buildings, create a new atrium complete with a soaring blue whale skeleton and bring new life to the Rolleston Avenue heritage buildings.

Watch the video