The powerhouse was built to move Brisbane. Completed in 1928 to a design by the city tramways architect Roy Rusden Ogg, it was the first power station the newly amalgamated Greater Brisbane City Council built and ran for itself, and its job was to electrify the entire tram network. At full stretch it could push out 56 megawatts, feeding the trams and lighting suburbs from Toowong to Yeerongpilly. For four decades it hummed away on the northern riverbank, a working heart pumping power into a growing city, its three great volumes, boiler house, turbine room and switch house, stacked along the water.

Then the city changed its mind about trams. A shift in council transport policy in 1967 doomed the network, and Brisbane's last tram ran on 13 April 1969. With nothing left to power, the station was decommissioned in 1971 and simply abandoned. For nearly thirty years it sat empty above the river, stripped of its machinery, its brick walls slowly colonised by weather and by graffiti writers who slipped inside. It might easily have been demolished. The complex was vast, three linked sections of boiler house, turbine room and switch house, with the boiler house looming largest of all, and a vast empty industrial shell on prime riverfront land is exactly the kind of building a city tends to flatten. Instead, through a land exchange in 1989, the Brisbane City Council got the building back, and a quieter idea took hold: that this hulking, half-ruined relic could become something else entirely.

The conversion, led by Brisbane City Council architect Peter Roy, made a bold creative choice. Rather than scrub the building clean, the design preserved its rough industrial character, its raw brick, fragments of old powerhouse machinery, and even the graffiti, treating the marks of abandonment as part of the story. The vast turbine room became the main performance space; smaller theatres and a riverside plaza were threaded through the old structure. The reborn Brisbane Powerhouse opened on 10 May 2000 and was extended again in 2007. What could have been a sterile renovation became something rarer: a venue where the history is not hidden behind the art but stands beside it on every wall.

Today the Powerhouse is one of Brisbane's busiest cultural hubs, mixing theatre, comedy, music, visual art and free community events with weekend markets and a riverside restaurant. It produces its own festivals, the Brisbane Comedy Festival, MELT, OHM and Night Feast among them, and every weekend it stages free live music and comedy on its Turbine Platform, so the building keeps welcoming people who never buy a ticket at all. Its programs have drawn companies from across the globe, from the Belarus Free Theatre to performers from Ireland, India, Malaysia and beyond, alongside Australian troupes. It sits right beside New Farm Park, so a night at the theatre can begin with a walk under the river-edge trees, the jacarandas flaring purple in spring. The building that once kept the city's trams running now keeps its imagination running, proof that a dead machine can be given an entirely new life without erasing the old one.