Museum of Old and New Art Awarded for Engineering Excellence

The landmark MONA development is situated on the banks of the Derwent River at Moorilla Vineyard in Berriedale, Tasmania. MONA’s development required a unique combination of architecture, structural, civil, services, mining and geotechnical engineering practices to deliver an extraordinary three-story, subterranean building with a 140 metre long building containing more than 6,000 cubic metres of concrete. Once a sheer cliff face, the site has been transformed by using tunneling, shaft and extraction techniques from large-scale mine operations to move more than 35,000 cubic metres of sandstone and fill.

A 1,400 square metre sandstone feature wall provides a 12 metre high exposed feature in the Museum and is ‘living’ as parts flow with water during rain.  Utilising low quality in situ sandstone for a 140 metre long feature support wall required close attention to technical detail, a complex arrangement of post tensioned band beams, waffle slabs and precast infill ribs.

The award judges were impressed by the exceptional coordination that was required to bring the quarrying, mining, civil construction and building service aspects of this project together. Complex integrated building services are virtually invisible, concealed within the exposed concrete structure.

Voted #1 in the Gourmet Traveller Hot 100 list in April 2011 as the "most awesome museum”, MONA is predicted to attract more than 250,000 visitors in its first year of operation – about half the population of Tasmania. The privately funded museum cost an estimated A$75 million dollars to develop.

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Angela James, Corporate Communications Manager, Coffey
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