It would have been about five years ago
I first came down into the Tank.
We had heard about it,
there were sort of rumours about it.
We went over to this large manhole,
donned gumboots,
and climbed down these
sort of scaffolding stairs
into the Tank, which was still at that point
filled with half a metre of water.
But there was nothing
in what I'd heard about the Tank
up to that point,
that really prepared me
for what I found when I got down there.
The scale of the space,
the smell of the space,
the echo, the sound,
walking through water,
seeing the patina on the wall.
And since that time, we've seen the Tank
go through a whole cycle of experiences
from that very still, quiet moment
through massive construction
and then coming back now,
as the building's about to open,
and it actually looks pretty much
like it looked at the beginning,
which has been the goal of the project,
to give back to Sydney
this secret, mysterious space
and make it a place for art.
So we're standing here now
in one of the two oil tanks
that were built in 1942
when the Pacific War was ramping up.
Singapore had just fallen.
The American naval fleet
was coming to Sydney.
We've preserved one of them as part of the new building,
as part of the Sydney Modern Project.
The tanks themselves are remarkable.
We've tried to keep this one
as close to the condition
it was in when we found it.
The space still has the same patina on the walls,
about 125 columns, 7 metres high.
A very particular sound experience,
there’s an echo of around 20 seconds.
It would originally have held
about over six million litres of oil.
That's all been cleaned out,
minimal intervention.
And our plan is to have
major installations down here
where we’ll invite an artist
to create something
in this space unique to this space,
therefore, unique to Sydney.
The architects of our new building
are a company called SANAA,
based in Tokyo.
So one of the many aspects of SANAA’s concept
was the way that they incorporated
this oil tank as part of their design.
Originally, they had thought of possibly
putting a mezzanine over
one part of this tank,
but as soon as they got down here, they realised
it just had to be preserved intact
as much as possible.
The plan they came up with
was to remove
just one column
to drop in a spiral staircase
and the beauty of it,
the purity of it,
this steel, this white-painted steel
spiral staircase,
three complete spirals
weighing over 20 tonnes,
craned in through this giant circular oculus.
And the way I like to think about it,
it's almost like in a lot of writing about Buddhism,
where the beauty of the lotus
is the way that this radiant flower
grows out of a muddy pond.
And for this building,
I like to think of
their beautiful building
rising out of this old oil tank,
through this extraordinary white spiral staircase.
So just as SANAA’s thinking about the Tank
developed over the course of the project,
from their original concept to deciding that
they should leave this tank absolutely as it was,
we were also thinking
how artists might react to it.
So during that period
we brought a number of artists down here –
dancers, musicians,
visual artists – and experimented.
What would it be like
for someone to dance
in a space with 125 columns,
a space that has no centre, it has no stage?
What would it be like for a musician to play here
with this very particular acoustic quality, this echo?
And for a visual artist,
how might they conceive
using a very large space,
2200 square metres,
where would they put objects?
How would they light the objects?
So ever since we first
came down into the Tank
a good five years ago now,
we've just been dreaming of the day where we could
welcome the public into the space
to share that amazing experience.
Whether you come down the spiral staircase
or whether you come down the lift,
you will enter a space
like nothing in any other
art museum around the world.
This one is unique to Sydney
and will be a place where you encounter
unique art installations
by leading artists
from Australia and around the world
and that is something that we can't wait
to share with the public from
December 2022.