kit of parts

Designed by SANAA, Sydney Modern heralds a new chapter for the city’s art scene with a fragmented datum that integrates art, topography and the surrounding landscaping

- Luo Jingmei

In December last year, Sydney, Australia, saw a new addition to its cultural offerings with the Sydney Modern Project. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese firm SANAA helmed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the building reviews the museum trope with a spectacular design that makes a fine case study on the relationship between building and place.

“The new expansion is a series of pavilions placed on a terraced site. The experience of seeing art and the building is intertwined with the experience of understanding the site and the Sydney context,” says project architect Asano Yagi.

specific to site 

The new built forms correspond with the 151-year-old Art Gallery of New South Wales that has an iconic 19th-century neoclassical façade. The fragmentation of the new build relates to the scale of the existing building and brings the landscape closer to the core. “They sit in the landscape plan with the neighbouring Domain – a 34-hectare parkland east of the Central Business District – and Royal Botanic Gardens. The [old and new components] work together and do not dominate one another,” says Yagi.

The architecture adds much-needed exhibition space to the existing offerings while respecting and enhancing the use of the surrounding landscape of the Domain. Significant trees were retained and the access to Sydney’s eastern cultural prescient was improved with the transformation of a land bridge built in the late 1990s to connect the Art Gallery to the Botanic Gardens into an art garden and civic gathering space.