Powerhouse Parramatta opens Saturday, its steel lattice and column-free galleries ready for visitors

Powerhouse Parramatta opens to the public on Saturday 7 November, giving Western Sydney its first state cultural institution and New South Wales the largest museum it has ever built. Delivered as a $915 million project, the museum sits on the banks of the Parramatta River, wrapped in a steel lattice exoskeleton that forms its external structural frame.

It was designed by Franco-Japanese practice Moreau Kusunoki as lead designer, with Genton as local architect and Arup on the design team. Lendlease built it over four years, finishing the main building works in April 2026. Since then, the Powerhouse team has been installing exhibitions.

Project at a glance

Won in an international competition

The design was chosen through an international competition that opened in January 2019 and was run by Malcolm Reading Consultants. It drew 74 teams made up of 529 firms. Moreau Kusunoki and Genton were announced as the winners in December 2019, ahead of five other shortlisted teams.

The winning scheme described the museum as a flexible "hyper-platform": seven Presentation Spaces (large, adaptable galleries), with a layer of in-between space inspired by the Japanese idea of "mâ". Its latticed outer frame lets passers-by catch glimpses of the exhibitions inside.

The exoskeleton

An exoskeleton is a structural frame on the outside of a building. Because the external frame supports the building, the interior can be free of columns and beams, which leaves room for very large galleries.

Powerhouse Parramatta's exoskeleton uses three types of steel lattice, made from more than 1,300 individual pieces in W, X, N and A shapes, ranging from 4 to 20 metres tall. Moreau Kusunoki set the pattern and geometry, and Arup's engineers developed it so the lattice patterns directly express the building's structural logic. The project used 12,000 tonnes of structural steel, most of it in the exoskeleton.

Sections were assembled on the ground and lifted into place by three tower cranes, including what Infrastructure NSW describes as the world's largest-capacity tower crane, which can lift 330 tonnes. Behind the lattice sit more than 13,000 square metres of self-cleaning glass, along with solid walls around the light-sensitive galleries. The museum's two wings are joined by a glazed two-storey bridge.

Seven column-free exhibition spaces

The largest gallery, Exhibition Space 1, covers more than 2,000 square metres and stands 18 metres high. Infrastructure NSW calls it the largest column-free exhibition space in Australia, with a volume equal to about 15 Olympic swimming pools. Facing the Parramatta River, it has a glazed mechanical hoisting door 56 metres long, 9 metres high and weighing 136 tonnes, which links the gallery to the public space outside. Up top, a rooftop terrace and garden overlooks Parramatta.

Designed for the river

The museum is built to cope with floods. Its ground floor sits at reduced level (RL) 7.5, a surveyed height in metres, compared with RL 1.9 at the river's edge. Flood modelling found that even in a "1 in 1000" year Parramatta River flood (a 0.1% chance in any year), the ground floor would stay half a metre above the water.

Under the ground floor is an undercroft of about 4,340 square metres, designed to let floodwater flow through. Infrastructure NSW reported that during floods while the museum was being built, water entered the undercroft and drained away as designed. Most of the exhibition spaces and the emergency power supplies sit above any possible flood level.

Built with Western Sydney

More than 4,000 workers put in over 2.7 million hours on site, and three-quarters of the workforce came from Western Sydney. Western Sydney businesses won more than $329 million in contracts. Crews removed 35,000 tonnes of soil and poured 230 piles which, laid end to end, would stretch 2.1 kilometres.

The museum is the first public building in Australia, and the first project in Western Sydney, to be assessed as a 6 Star Designed project under the Green Building Council of Australia's Green Star Buildings tool. Once open, it will be all-electric and run on 100% renewable electricity, and its tower cranes ran on renewable diesel during construction.

What's next

Doors open on Saturday 7 November, with a 23-day opening festival running until 29 November. Five opening exhibitions feature more than 3,000 objects, over 1,600 of them from the Powerhouse collection, and most exhibitions are free. Task Eternal explores flight and space and includes the historic Qantas Avro 504K aircraft, while The Mall traces the history of the shopping centre across two storeys.

Published 4 November 2026 · Updated 27 October 2026