The University of South Australia's Architecture Museum is a dynamic hub of research into South Australia’s architectural and built environment history utilising its research collection of architects’ and allied professionals’ records.
The Architecture Museum is a nationally unique entity with an established academic, professional and community profile. The Architecture Museum:
- generates new knowledge about the history of architecture and the built environment locally, nationally, and internationally.
- leads and fosters research into, and the promotion of, the history of architecture and the built environment through research projects, publications, teaching support, and public events including exhibitions, lectures, and symposia.
- creates and promotes public appreciation of the many dimensions of architecture and its allied disciplines.
- preserves and makes available to students staff and the public, its collection of records of architects and associated professionals practicing privately in South Australia.
News and Upcoming Events
The Architecture Museum will be open on Sunday 27th July 2025 9am-4pm for the Adelaide University Open Day. More information about Open Day can be found HERE.
Using the Museum collections
The Architecture Museum is an invaluable resource for researchers, students, and practitioners from a range of disciplines, architects, planners, engineers, heritage consultants, historians and all those interested in the State’s built history and heritage.
Housed in a purpose-built facility, our research collection is comprised of more than 400,000 items including architectural drawings, correspondence, photographs and architects’ personal papers, as well as a library of books, research reports, journals, and trade literature. These items have been donated by architects working in private practice in South Australia during the twentieth century, particularly in the period circa 1910 to 1980.
Search collection and catalogue
Opening hours
Monday to Wednesday - 10.00am-12noon and 1.00pm-4.00pm (by appointment only)
Architects of South Australia Database
Search this selection of South Australian architects' biographies and works from 1836 to the present day. This database contains historical information on individuals, architectural practices, built works and lists of sources.
Research
The Architecture Museum generates new knowledge through staff and undergraduate and postgraduate research projects, publications and exhibitions. It produces an award winning monograph series and the scholarly online biographical database called ‘Architects of South Australia’. The Architecture Museum aims to publish research findings of Museum-based scholars who work in the areas of architectural and built environment history and pertaining particularly to South Australia, these include academic and professional journal articles, books and exhibitions. It encourages and supports staff of UniSA Creative and other UniSA academic units, Masters and PhD candidates and other academic and community-based scholars to use the Museum’s collections for individual and collaborative research projects and to publish in a variety of fora. Past projects range from a multi-authored book on the 1887 Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition Building to research into the South Australian Home Builders Club 1945-65.
You can find a list of research publications from the Architecture Museum HERE.
Affiliated Research - HOMELAB
With our climate changing rapidly, and society facing deepening cleavages along lines of wealth, health and opportunity, negative impacts on housing affordability, accessibility, and sustainability can appear intractable. And yet, we remain hopeful.
Home Lab produces solid, impactful research that improves people’s lives through our built environment. Our inter-disciplinary research spans healthy and climate resilient housing, adaptive reuse and innovative housing models, the places we call home, and the design and role of everyday architecture. We are future-focussed, optimistic, productive and inclusive.
We focus on the places people live and housing everyone well through turbulent times.
Research Team: Associate Professor Lyrian Daniel, Associate Professor Damian Madigan, Dr Julie Collins.
Archiving Digital Architectural Records
Another of the research projects undertaken by the Architecture Museum developed a framework for archiving born digital architectural records. The key challenges associated with archiving these records involves: establishing the rationale for collecting records produced in a digital environment, determining which records to archive and how to archive them, and understanding how to achieve digital continuity in rapidly evolving and changing electronic environments.
Architecture Museum, Kaurna Building, photographer Sam Noonan 2012
Online Merchandise
The Architecture Museum produces a colour monograph series of books on South Australian architectural history. These can be purchased online at PayUniSA for $20 plus postage if required.
You can also pay for digital copies of documents using this link.
UniSA Architecture Museum: These walls can talk
“Architecture is built on precedent,” says Dr Julie Collins, architectural historian, curator, and active researcher. “It involves looking back and seeing what has worked and what hasn’t and building on from those things that have served us well.”
Profile of UniSA Architecture Museum written by Bill Condie
Research degree opportunities
The Architecture Museum offers a diverse and rich array of sources for research degree (both PhD and Masters) projects in fields including: architecture, built environment history and theory, interior architecture, urban history, design, social and cultural history. Get in touch with UniSA Creative staff to discuss options for your research degree and how you can use the resources available in the Architecture Museum.
Past Events
2025 Architecture Museum Symposium - 'Modernism and the Everyday: A South Australian Perspective'
Taking the idea of design in everyday things as a provocation, speakers at this symposium explored the South Australian experience of modern design and architecture. Download the Program and Abstracts HERE.
International Confederation of Architectural Museums (ICAM) Australasian Regional Meeting, 16-17 November 2023, Adelaide.
The ICAM regional meeting included speakers from across Australia and New Zealand including Kevin Liu (Warren Mahoney and GSD Harvard), David Kennedy (Robert Bird Engineers and Engineering Heritage Australia), Sarah Cox (University of Auckland), Rachel Bell (Fletcher Trust), Antoinette Buchanan (ACT Heritage Library), Erin Kimber (Macmillan Brown Library), Ann Carew (RMIT Design Archives), Mary Lewis and Peter Johnson (State Library of Victoria), Chris Burns (Heritage South Australia), Bethany Pietsch (Lutheran Archives), Naomi Mullumby (University of Melbourne), Donald Watson (architectural historian, Queensland), Meher Bahl (Restore Conservation Services, Melbourne), and Cara Stewart and Sarah Rees (Powerhouse). Download the Program HERE.
Click here to watch recordings of the event now on YouTube.
Our history
Over the past two decades the Architecture Museum has held an important role in South Australia's cultural landscape as a resource for research, teaching and learning, raising awareness of the history and culture not only of South Australian built heritage but also of architecture more broadly. It began in the 1970s, when, in the absence of a repository in South Australia for retired private architectural practitioners to deposit their records, architectural historian Donald Leslie Johnson began collecting their archives. In 1990 he donated the collection to the School of the Built Environment at the University of South Australia. This collection of architectural drawings, ephemera and books began to be made publicly accessible in the late 1990s and was renamed the Architecture Museum in 2005 when it opened its doors in the Kaurna Building at the City West campus of the University of South Australia.
Our people
The Architecture Museum is open to the public Monday-Wednesday and is staffed by Dr Julie Collins who directs the day-to-day operations of the Museum including archival collection management, exhibition curation, research and providing access to the reading room. Dr James Curry is engaged in the strategic direction, academic engagement and international outreach of the Museum. Dr Susan Avey works in the Museum accessioning the collections as well as assisting with exhibitions. Dr Susan Lustri is engaged on research projects and the Architects of SA database. Adjunct academic staff members, Assoc. Prof. Christine Garnaut, Dr Louise Bird, and Mr Tim Reeves are also associated with the Architecture Museum as researchers and assist with the collection. All staff undertake research on and about the collection, specifically, architectural, planning, heritage, landscape and interior design histories. UniSA Creative staff working with the Architecture Musem on affiliated projects also include Dr Nathan Crane, Assoc Prof Lyrian Daniel, and Assoc Prof Damian Madigan.
The Architecture Museum has an Advisory Group comprised of members external to the University as well as key internal personnel. The Museum is a member of the International Confederation of Architecture Museums (ICAM).
Contact Us
Telephone: 08 8302 9235
Email: architecturemuseum@unisa.edu.au
Opening hours: Monday to Wednesday - 10.00 am-4.00 pm (by appointment only)
Where to find us
Building K - Level 2
University of South Australia's
City West Campus
2 Fenn Place
Adelaide
South Australia 5000
