DOUBLEGROUND

Doubleground Melbourne, Victoria

Muir and Openwork

As you emerge from Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and enter the courtyard, it’s unclear where Doubleground, the 2018 NGV Architecture Commission by Muir and Openwork begins or ends. Its presence is transformative, yet also embedded within the Grollo Equiset Garden – there’s an underlying sense that it could have always been there. A field of yarrow and strawflower sways at eye level, and emerging from a sharp, tilted embankment, kangaroo paw hovers over an understorey of native and exotic species. The blooms serve as a beacon that draws visitors (both, 1958) has been offered a bouquet of flowers to admire, the shifting tones of yellow referencing the NGV’s Great Hall and the golden carpet that originally lay beneath – a place where many have laid down to better experience the field of fragmented glowing colour overhead in Leonard French’s famous stained-glass ceiling.