A Magnificent Building

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In the ancient, beautiful landscape of Yuwaalaraay country at Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, ground has been broken in preparation for the construction of a new Australian Opal Centre building.

This amazing nationally-significant museum, designed by acclaimed architect Wendy Lewin in association with Dunn + Hillam architects, based on an initial concept by Wendy Lewin and Glenn Murcutt, will be an energy-efficient, two storey underground building, filled with glittering treasures and stories of the people who found them.

Visitors will approach the new Australian Opal Centre across the historic Three Mile opal field, where Bimble Box and Wild Orange trees, intriguing machines and mounds of pink and cream opal dirt create a sparsely beautiful outback landscape that echoes with more than a century of opal mining history.

There, they will discover a remarkable building recessed into, and protected by, the earth.

The facility will be constructed in stages and when fully realised, will contain magnificent permanent exhibitions, education and learning facilities, a cinema, gallery spaces, a spectacular opal vault, research library, scientific laboratory and underground gardens.

The new Australian Opal Centre will use a combination of ancient and cutting-edge modern technologies to generate energy, collect water, and capture light and fresh air.

The large roof will collect rainwater and solar energy. Gradients of air temperature and pressure will drive passive ventilation systems, not unlike those used by opal miners to keep fresh air flowing through their mines.

Entering the building through an earth-covered tunnel, visitors will encounter an expansive underground space, lit from above by natural light and with daylight pouring in at the end of a long, gently descending ramp.

There will be exhibitions about opal, fossils, opal mining technology and culture, and the people, faces and legends of Australia’s opal fields. Ultimately, in the final stage of development, there will be a cool underground Gondwanan garden containing trees - Wollemi pines! - ferns, cycads and other descendants of the plants that lived 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the place we now know as Lightning Ridge.

This is the vision for the Australian Opal Centre's magnificent new building. Innovations in design, materials and processes will generate new paradigms for the future of public architecture in semi-arid Australia.

The building design will conserve water and energy, minimise running costs and attract millions of visitors from around Australia and the world for generations to come.

The new Australian Opal Centre will be developed in stages. Commitments in excess of $20 million have been secured for design and construction of Stage 1. After years of planning, consultation, fundraising and detailed design - and having navigated the significant challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on construction industry supply chains - in 2023 we are poised ready to see our new AOC emerge from the ground.

Barpa Pty Ltd, a 51% Indigenous owned Australian construction company, has been appointed head contractor (builder) for Stage 1 of the new AOC and in August 2023, will mobilise to the site of the new Australian Opal Centre and prepare to begin construction. The new AOC Stage 1 is expected to open to the public in the second half of 2024.