The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart has announced the completion of a new wing for the building, set to open in June. A communique from the museum notes that the extension has been designed by Australian architect Nonda Katsalidis, working alongside German artist Anselm Kiefer and the museum’s founder and owner David Walsh.
According to the museum, the new wing is the result of “four years of construction and ten years of headaches,” costing almost tenfold its initial $11 million budget at over $100 million. It will feature a library to house Walsh’s collection of rare books, maps and other paraphernalia, along with artworks by Kiefer, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière and others.
The media communique notes that the project has been dubbed “Phrontisterion” – a term coined by Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes to describe a “thinkery,” with the building’s contents “reveal[ing] a way of treating books as curatable objects.”
Walsh said, “I was always all-in on books and libraries. My first library card was the great leveller, the thing that gave impoverished child-me a chance to seek.”
In keeping with the building’s previous additions, an underground tunnel carved through sandstone will connect Phrontisterion to the existing museum, which was designed by Fender Katsalidis and completed in 2011, winning the Australian Institute of Architects 2012 Sir Zelman Cowan Award for Public Architecture.
The library itself is located beneath Kiefer’s Elektra, an amphitheatre likened to an inverted ziggurat, which was first built by Kiefer at his studio at La Ribaute in Barjac, Southern France, and which was inaugurated in December 2025.
Kiefer commented, “I like this idea to have Barjac on the other side of the globe. It’s fantastic. It contradicts the laws of gravity.”
Sculptures and paintings by Kiefer will be installed throughout. The new wing will also accommodate Breathe, a permanent installation by Charrière that invites visitors to breathe air that has never been breathed before.
Charrière said, “We had to learn how to dislodge 2.4-billion-year-old oxygen from red-banded iron ore formed during the Great Oxidation Event, a technically demanding process involving years of scientific collaboration, the building of a chemical reactor, and sourcing ancient material from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, formed in Proterozoic seas during the rise of oxygen likely driven by early cyanobacteria.”
The opening of the new wing will coincide with the return of Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda’s light-tower, Spectra, as well as the MONA debut of In Absence, an architectural installation by local Kokatha/Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce and Melbourne architects Aaron Roberts and Kim Bridgland for the 2019 NGV Architecture Commission.
The nine-metre-high timber tower takes inspiration from traditional eel traps and is adorned with 1,400 hand-blown, black glass murnong, or daisy yams. It will be built anew, after the original installation was, according to writer Adair Winder, “painstakingly dismantled” and repurposed into a site-specific intervention in a former sandstone quarry in Victoria’s Otway Ranges, as part of a collaborative project between Monash University students and These Are The Projects We Do Together.
Initial plans for the library at MONA were part of a project for a new hotel, which was first revealed in 2018 and later put on hold. According to Walsh, the intent to build a hotel is still in the works.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
