Museum of Contemporary Art

Location: 140 George Street, Circular Quay West
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) is Australia's leading museum dedicated to exhibiting, interpreting and collecting contemporary art from across Australia and around the world. The MCA Store is one of Sydney's unique shopping destinations. The museum was opened in 1991 as The Museum of Contemporary Art, and occupied the Art Deco-style former Maritime Services Board Building on the western edge of Circular Quay. From 2010 underwent a $58 million expansion and re-development, fully reopening as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in March 2012. The new extension, called the Mordant Wing, opened in March 2012.

Maritime Services Board Building

Designed in inter-War Stripped Classical style with Egyptian influenced Art Deco embellishments, the former Maritime Services building is of steel frame construction encased in concrete, with brick walls clad in yellow Maroubra sandstone, all on a base of red granite. The entrance foyer features Wombeyan marble and green Mudgee marble. It was purpose built as the headquarters of the Maritime Services Board which once controlled all wharves and shipping in NSW. Maritime symbols such as a ship's wheel, propeller and anchor are carved high on the centre of the facade.

The five-storey building occupies the site of Gov. Macquarie's Commissariat Stores, which were opened in 1812 and demolished in 1940 to make way for this building. Due to the intervention of the War and the shortage of labour and materials after it, the building was not completed until 1952. Like its neighbour, the Cahill Freeway, it is not sympathetic in character to its historic surroundings, even though it is an excellent example of Art deco architecture. Both the former Maritime Services building and the Cahill Freeway were erected at a time when little value was placed on the city's cultural heritage and 'progress' was seen as more important than aesthetics.