SANAA wins Art Gallery of NSW expansion in Sydney

The Art Gallery of New South Wales announced today that Pritzker Prize laureates Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA will design the Gallery's upcoming expansion. The Tokyo-based firm won the project out of 12 shortlisted leading firms that included Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Kengo Kuma & Associates, David Chipperfield Architects, Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, Herzog de Meuron, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects, to name a few.

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As part of the Gallery's Sydney Modern Project, the expansion will upgrade the existing building into a new global cultural landmark that connects the Gallery, the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Domain, the city, and Sydney Harbor.

SANAA incorporated the gallery site's surrounding topography in their design, which features cascading platforms of natural-colored sandstone and an ample amount of glass. The expansion will double the size of the 23,000 sq.m. gallery and include new educational facilities, performance and film spaces, open exhibition areas for showcasing art, and the reintroduction of natural daylight into the original 19th-century galleries.

SANAA and the Art Gallery will work closely to finalize the design concept within the next year. The NSW government already pledged $10 million to the project, but the Gallery's next challenge will be raising the remaining funds to carry out the project. If all goes well, the new gallery is scheduled for completion in 2021 in time for its 150th anniversary.

The Sydney Modern Project Jury featured:

• Michael Brand (Chair): Director, Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Kathryn Gustafson: landscape architect with Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (Seattle) and Gustafson Porter (London)
• Michael Lynch CBE AM: CEO West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, Hong Kong
• Toshiko Mori: Robert P Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture - Harvard University Graduate School of Design
• Glenn Murcutt AO: Australian architect and recipient of the 2002 Pritzker Architecture Prize
• Juhani Pallasmaa: Helsinki-based architect, professor emeritus and widely published writer
• Hetti Perkins: Member of the Eastern Arrernte and Kalkadoon Aboriginal communities and internationally acclaimed curator, filmmaker and author