CHROFI were engaged to assist Sydney Living Museums with the submission of their final Business Case to the Treasury in order to secure funding for the upgrade of the Justice and Police Museum, soon to be known as the Sydney Crime Museum.

The upgrade to the Museum building aims to enhance the visitor experience as well as address key accessibility and public awareness issues. A greater engagement of the museum with the street and sensitivity to the heritage fabric have been key drivers in the design process.

Through the implementation of a new 1st person visitor experience program and the introduction of an internal and external spatial logic that organises the visitor experience more coherently, the museum can begin to promote its content in a more engaging way.

By creating a new and accessible ‘ground plane’ in the form of a street level forecourt on the corner of Albert St and Phillip St the museum can provide a legible street address. Interwoven with a re-imagined two storey ‘verandah’, the ground plane expands to encompass the upper level, becoming a more contiguous field from which a new, more meaningful museum experience can emerge.

The new ground plane would stitch together all surrounding and interstitial spaces, allowing visitors to move more freely through and around the three buildings and gain a better understanding of the site.

The new Sydney Crime Museum will be characterised by a transformative spatial narrative which seeks to promote the history of the site and the intrigue which is embedded within its collection.