There was a time when the National Museum of Australia stood out from Canberra's Griffin-inspired, Garden City landscape like a beacon of strangeness.
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Modern and bright, filled with angles, loops, primary colours and hidden, raffish details, if only you knew where to look ("sorry" written in braille on the side of the building, for starters), it provoked wonder, bemusement, confusion and, from some quarters, downright hostility.
Today, 20 years since it opened, the museum feels more of the landscape, rather than leaping out of it - an established part of a cityscape that is still changing.
It's exactly what Howard Raggatt, the architect who designed it, hoped to achieve when he set out to create a modern edifice for the Acton Peninsula.
"In a way, initially, probably a building should be a bit of a surprise because it's something new and it's something that's really pitching itself into the future, it doesn't want to be something that's retrospective, or in the past before it's even finished," he told The Canberra Times on the eve of the museum's 20th anniversary.
"Maybe it was a bit surprising to people, initially, but what you hope about a building is that it just becomes part of the whole scenographic city, and everybody finds it enjoyable ... it gradually becomes like the rest of the city as a sort of background to real life."
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But despite settling nicely into the landscape, he said the museum was intended as an ever-changing space, with current renovations opening up one of the main exhibition spaces to make it easier to navigate.
"I think probably the building was a bit of an impediment because of the approach of the exhibition design, and I think there is a different design attitude out there [now]," he said.
"The ease of flowing through those spaces is now regarded as much more important. People in a museum need to be able to just enjoy walking through it. You've got kids, you've got lots of distractions, or you've got things to do and so you can't really design it only for the constantly educational mode.
"It needs to be that, but it also needs to be just a pleasurable experience on a Sunday afternoon."
And he said that 20 years on, he still got a buzz from seeing visitors walking around the building he designed.
"It actually belongs to everyone," he says. "I think that's how it should be, not that old modernist thing about somehow the architect owns the project, I think that's wrong."