Naala Badu, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery Road, The Domain
SANAA with Architectus. Competition 2015, opened 2 December 2022. Contemporary.
- Size
- Overall size not found; the drawing is estimated from a photograph, using the 11 m atrium height for scale. The gallery’s exhibition space almost doubled, to about 16,000 m²
- Material
- Portuguese limestone, steel, glass, rammed earth
- Status
- A public art museum. 6 Star Green Star design rating
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo firm SANAA won the international competition for the Sydney Modern Project in 2015. Their building opened on 2 December 2022, north of the Vernon sandstone building of 1909. Wikipedia gives the cost as A$344 million in one place and A$450 million in another. The gallery has called the new building Naala Badu since April 2024, meaning “seeing waters” in the Sydney language, and the old one Naala Nura, “seeing Country”.
A series of pavilions steps down the hill from Art Gallery Road toward Woolloomooloo Bay, with terraces, green roofs and courtyards between them. The Institute of Architects’ jury described canted and warped pavilions that overlap and cascade down toward the harbour, with tall, wide, column-free galleries. The walls are faced in limestone from Portugal. A rammed-earth wall made from local sand, about 250 m long, runs through two levels, and slumped glass vaults cover the entry on slender posts.
At the bottom is the Tank, a naval oil bunker of the Second World War, now a columned gallery for temporary exhibitions. Concrete from the former tanks was recycled into the new mixes. The building won the Sulman Medal and a National Award for Public Architecture in 2023.
Sources
- Art Gallery of New South Wales, Wikipedia
- Aboriginal names for buildings, Art Gallery of New South Wales
- Art Gallery of NSW, Naala Badu building, Architectus
- Sydney Modern Project by SANAA, Architecture Australia
- 2023 National Award for Public Architecture, Architecture Australia