SANAA and the Art Gallery of NSW open the Sydney Modern building
The Japanese architects behind Sydney Modern say they want to offer a different kind of gallery-going experience.
Much has been said in recent days about Sydney Modern, the new building for the Art Gallery of NSW, being the first major piece of cultural infrastructure in the city since the Opera House opened in 1973. The observation only highlights that such a building is a half-century overdue. When it comes to exciting public architecture – not corporate towers, casinos and residential apartments – Sydney has lagged well behind other cities that have earned the right to call themselves a global metropolis.
And Sydney Modern, designed by Japanese architectural firm SANAA, is a very different building from Joern Utzon’s masterpiece. The Opera House, in splendid isolation on Bennelong Point, is heroic architecture, a modernist temple to art that inspires reverence and awe.
SANAA has achieved something different with Sydney Modern. It’s a big building but, from street level at least, not monumental. Set in newly landscaped grounds opposite the Royal Botanic Garden, its arrangement of pavilions is nestled into the sloping topography of the site. And unlike a traditional art gallery, with an enfilade of rooms directing the visitor’s experience, Sydney Modern is rather less prescriptive – a choose-your-own art adventure.
In an interview, SANAA principals Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa explain some of their thinking behind the new gallery, which opens to the public on Saturday. It’s not only a place for the display of art, but a meeting place for people and ideas.
“Compared to the previous museums of the last century, museums have become more of a place where culture appears,” Nishizawa says. “This is not only a place for exhibiting art; the museum has become a place where people exchange something important.”
Says Sejima: “The new public space and the art gallery will be defined also by people’s activities. The museum becomes slightly different from others.”
In their design they have been guided by the location – with the city and parkland behind, and views towards Woolloomooloo and the harbour – as well as by history. The new gallery has taken shape over a basement of World War II-era navy oil tanks, needed when Japan was the enemy. Now Japanese architects have built upon and transformed those industrial relics into an exciting new space for contemporary art.
“You can understand how Sydney grew up when you come to this place,” Nishizawa says. “You can see the harbour, you can see the Opera House, you can see downtown. You see the tank, the retaining wall around the highway. This is what Sydney people created during modernisation.
“Another thing is that I see Australian nature here – the ocean, and the green, and the rain. A very big land, compared to Japan. Japan is a small island in the big ocean. People always feel the ocean. Here, I think people feel the continent.”
Sydney Modern is the key addition to what is now being called an “art campus” for the Art Gallery of NSW, comprising the south building (the historic AGNSW) and the north building (Sydney Modern). Completion of the north building adds 17,000sq m to the campus, with almost double the space available for exhibitions.
The beautifully landscaped grounds, masterplanned by US landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, has given Sydney a new public square. Reflective pools and an enlarged pedestrian area outside the AGNSW have given Walter Liberty Vernon’s sandstone facade renewed dignity. The eye follows a line of strong vertical elements, from the classical columns of the portico to the stand of palm trees and the columns of SANAA’s vast canopy over the entry to Sydney Modern.
“The site is really extraordinary – how it has the backdrop of the Domain and the city, and the water,” says Gustafson, who was also a member of the panel that selected SANAA’s design from an invitation-only competition.
“What I loved about their building is that it’s tucked in. We don’t need another Opera House – we have an Opera House. We needed a new kind of architecture that was sympathetic to the landscape, a lot of green, environmentally friendly, more diversity, more open spaces. It had a lot of respect for the site.”
Winner of the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2010, and of the Praemium Imperiale this year, SANAA is noted for minimalist architecture that seeks environmental harmony. The firm’s other projects include the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; the Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland; the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; and the Louvre-Lens museum in France. An earlier scheme for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney – Sejima and Nishizawa’s first major collaboration – was cancelled and never built.
Some of SANAA’s signature features appear in Sydney Modern, such as the floor-to-ceiling windows, the elegant roof lines and the gently sloping floor in the entry pavilion – eliminating the need for awkward steps. But different materials are used here: a 250m rammed earth wall across two levels that echoes the site’s sandstone topography, and beautiful hand-polished limestone bricks cladding three of the pavilions.
“It is not a one-box building,” Nishizawa says. “If we do one box it would become huge. Then this will have a feeling of destroying nature. So we divided one program into different pieces, and we gave a different grid … Where you see the street and the entrance hall, you feel that the architecture fits to the street. But when you come down to the gallery to see the harbour, you feel that you are facing right to the ocean.”
The entry pavilion, parallel to Art Gallery Road, but entered from the side, opens on to a huge atrium that looks down into the building and links the individual pavilions. It’s a great place for people-watching. Escalators go down to the lower levels and the individual pavilions and exhibition spaces. And art can be found in surprising places, especially the oil tank in the bowels of the building, and Lee Mingwei’s installation of a Buddha in its own sanctuary. The Yiribana gallery of Indigenous art has been relocated from the AGNSW basement to the entry pavilion at Sydney Modern.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London who commissioned SANAA’s temporary pavilion there in 2009, says SANAA has changed the way people engage with art museums. By opening its buildings to the outside world, it removes psychological barriers to entry. He cites the example of Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, whose blurring of interior and exterior spaces was influential on SANAA.
“What I’m excited about is to see the homogeneity with the past – the classicism and the new,” he says of Sydney’s new art campus, which he is yet to see. “The series of pavilions towards the harbour is very interesting – it comes together very well.
“In addition, SANAA always have a great focus on gardens. Their perspective is to integrate gardens and plants into the museum. SANAA advocates for public gardens and, in this building, plants are interlocked with the pavilions. It’s so important that museums have both.”
When SANAA’s design was revealed in 2015, Paul Keating was not a fan, declaring it a “megaplex” on land belonging to the Botanic Garden. There was comment, too, about the amount of glass and whether artworks would be exposed to the harsh sun. It seemed harbour views had trumped the desire for a serious art museum.
Sydney Modern underwent revision after the initial plans were announced. And much of the art is displayed within galleries – Nishizawa refers to “boxes” – not in direct sunlight. “We made a box, and we made a space outside the box. This is two things, this is two places where people can exhibit, present art. They can do very specific art in the box, they can do more freedom outside the box. And outside the box people can see art together with the landscape. The box is important: you can have a direct interaction with art, but the outside is also nice.”
Public art galleries are power-hungry places, but Sydney Modern is designed to be ecologically friendly. Solar panels will provide 10 per cent of its energy needs, and captured rainwater will be used for irrigation and cooling. The building has been awarded a six-star Green Star design rating, the first public gallery to achieve it.
Gallery director Michael Brand says SANAA has produced an “extraordinary” building that offers a seamless experience of art, architecture and landscape.
“They have not only designed a unique example of civic architecture for us in Sydney,” he says, “but they have also given us a new type of art museum – deeply rooted in a sense of place, inspired by a site, warm in its embrace, fluid in its paths of circulation, thrilling in its sightlines, and offering a multiplicity of experiences.”