Sydney Museum of Modern Art

This schematic recreates the Sydney museum building on Circular Quay, modeled on the real Art Deco structure that houses the city's contemporary art collection. It captures the wide, symmetrical facade of the original in pale tan and gray blocks, with two long wings stretching out from a central section and squared end pavilions that step forward at each corner. Grids of evenly spaced windows march across every floor in the strict, orderly rhythm typical of the style, and a stepped cornice runs along the flat roofline to give the whole building a clean, monumental edge. Only the Art Deco half of the real museum is reproduced here, without the modern wing that sits alongside it in Sydney.

The centerpiece is the tower rising above the main entrance, its face decorated with tall vertical gold strips that draw the eye upward to a stepped crown topped with slender antenna spires. Below it, a broad flight of stairs climbs to the doorway, flanked by the same gold pilasters that anchor the center of the composition, while small decorative fixtures dot the paved plaza spreading out in front. Inside, the museum has been left mostly open, with bare floors stacked one above the next and no finished stairwell between them, giving builders a blank canvas to divide into galleries and connect with stairs of their own.