Te tūāoma tuatoru Enabling Works 2024-2025

The Museum’s project team worked with expert civil contractor March Construction to design the underground structures for the new base-isolated storage basement under the new building and the Robert McDougall Gallery.

In early 2024, a joint venture of Leighs Construction and March Construction began work on two key aspects of the build:

• The 12-metre-deep reinforced concrete outer basement wall, which is designed to keep groundwater out of the buildings, was completed in March/April 2025. This goes all the way around the perimeter of the Robert McDougall Gallery and the area where the twentieth-century buildings have been demolished.
• The ground floor of the Gallery has been strengthened in an incredible piece of engineering. The Gallery is now temporarily supported by large steel beams resting on more than 300 micropiles, drilled 15 metres deep. Remote-controlled diggers will soon begin excavating the Gallery basement so that the new foundations and storage basement can be built underneath.

Share our journey as we create almost 60 exhibitions and displays for the new Canterbury Museum.

How do you hang a 4.6-tonne blue whale skeleton from the ceiling? Canterbury Museum staff are deploying laser beams and a high-tech 3D scanning system to help answer that question.

The Museum’s blue whale skeleton will be suspended in spectacular fashion in the atrium of the new building when it opens in 2029. The whale, which is the largest skeleton in any museum collection in the world, will be back on public display for the first time since 1993.

To help work out how to suspend the 27-metre whale safely and in a realistic pose, Canterbury Museum drafted in Canadian experts to capture a three-dimensional scan of the nearly 200 bones in the skeleton.

Find out more in the video

The new basement under most of the Museum site and the Robert McDougall Gallery requires exceptional engineering to create a safe, waterproof and earthquake-resilient underground storage space for the precious Museum collection.

With big engineering comes big numbers. Workers will remove 25,000 cubic metres of soil from the site, which would fill 10 Olympic swimming pools. Then they will pour 9,500 cubic metres of concrete to build the basement floor and walls.

The basement will have three layers of waterproofing to keep the environment dry. The waterproofing technology is important as, at 6 metres deep, the basement will be 2 to 3 metres below the water table.

The 12-metre-deep underground concrete wall provides the first layer of waterproofing. If water gets through, it will be drained away from a 60-cm gap between this outer wall and the main inner basement space. The inner basement space will also be lined with a heavy-duty waterproof membrane to keep out moisture and water vapour.

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Every time Canterbury Museum technicians Jane Comeau and Sarah Cragg open a cardboard box they have no idea what they will discover inside.

It could be a tiny chess table standing a few centimetres high, an illustrated bible the size of a thumbnail or a grandfather clock no taller than a smartphone.

Jane and Sarah are part of a project to inventory and catalogue every miniature object in the much-loved dolls house from the Christchurch Street. The work involves opening cardboard boxes, unwrapping the carefully packed treasures inside, then photographing and creating a detailed digital record for every object, no matter how small.

Since 2017, the team have inventoried 564,000 objects, so there’s only 1.73 million to go. A major priority over the next few years is to inventory and check objects that will be displayed, many for the first time, in the new Museum.

See Christchurch Street treasures in the video

One of the joys of the redevelopment is revealing the Museum’s heritage facades that haven’t been seen for decades.

The northern gable end of the 1877 Mountfort building on Rolleston Avenue is now revealed for the first time since it was covered up by the construction of the Centennial Memorial Wing between 1955 and 1958.

Large excavators had to peel away a concrete wall that stood just a couple of centimetres from the historic stone facade—underneath the intact wall looked almost the same as it did in the early 1950s. The redevelopment is also revealing the heritage facades on the adjacent 1882 building.

The heritage walls will be cleaned and revived so that they remain a key feature of the new Museum entrance and atrium – viewed through a new glass curtain wall.

See the big reveal in the video

A Gallery on Stilts

An extraordinary piece of engineering is unfolding deep underground, hidden from the world.

Beneath the Robert McDougall Gallery on the edge of Christchurch Botanic Gardens, a team of workers and engineers has been working to put the much-loved building on stilts.

The 1930s Robert McDougall Gallery is being revamped and strengthened as part of the redevelopment of Canterbury Museum’s Rolleston Avenue site. It will link to a new building that will wrap around the Museum’s restored heritage buildings.

In the Gallery we'll display artworks from the Museum collection and other cultural institutions. Curators are poring through the Museum collection, uncovering lost gems that will go on display for the first time in many decades when the Museum reopens in 2029.

Watch the video