SANAA in Sydney - Art Gallery of NSW

SANAA in Sydney: The architecture of Naala Badu at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is in fact the third of three books released by the Art Gallery on the milestone Sydney Modern Project. While the first two covered social history and the institution itself – one released a year before the new building’s opening, the other at the time of its opening – this third book specifically focuses on the architecture.

Catching up with Michael Brand at the Art Gallery’s MOD Dining, it quickly becomes clear that architecture is not just an afterthought for the director. Rather, his enthusiasm for and knowledge of design is abundant. The same observation is easily drawn from the book itself, edited by Brand and featuring an impressive collection of contributors: Juhani Pallasmaa (design competition jurist, architect and academic), Eve Blau (Harvard University architectural historian), Anthony Burke (professor of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney), Yuko Hasegawa (director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa) and Sally Webster (the Art Gallery’s head of the Sydney Modern Project), as well as photo essays by Iwan Baan. It of course also carries a design statement from the founders of SANAA themselves, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.

“I’ve had almost a lifelong interest in architecture,” asserts Brand, who grew up in Canberra and recalls family memories of making models and drawings of cities and houses at home with his brother, who indeed became an architect. Away from the modernist planning of Australia’s capital city and time spent living in the US, Brand speaks about architecturally formative experiences such as a visit to Nepal – “going to temples where you have architecture, sculpture, pilgrims, cows, song, chanting, smoke… it was all senses and three-dimensional, so my first experiences really were not paintings lined up on a white wall.”

Brand then explains how PhD research took him to Fatehpur Sikri, the first planned city of Mughal India. “I see architectural spaces as places where great things can happen,” he says, describing how that city played host to the Emperor Akbar’s Ibadat Khana, an open salon of sorts for religious debate and discussion. The point – for our purposes at least – is that Brand is fully engaged with the architecture of Naala Badu as having crucial agency and influence in shaping the success and character of the Art Gallery. “A successful work of architecture can inspire great thinking and great creativity,” he adds.

The book is about the building itself but, more specifically, Brand explains that it addresses the question of how an institution goes about creating a work of public architecture. Aimed at both local and international audiences, as well perhaps as general readers alongside design afficionados, SANAA in Sydney delves into some of the defining qualities of the architecture at Naala Badu.

Pallasmaa’s essay, for example, argues for “an entirely new museum concept: the art museum as landscape.” He writes: “The Entrance Pavilion, as well as the galleries, avoids axialities and monumentality and creates a choreography of informal movements and atmospheres […] Instead of creating the traditional closed fort for art, lit from above, this architecture opens out to the site.

“It contextualises art through actively fusing exhibition spaces, outdoor terraces and gardens, works of art, and landscape and city views.”

Brand explains that the architecture aims to connect both in theoretical terms – think of the classic SANAA atmosphere of lightness and transparency – and in site-specific terms. With its slender white columns and copious use of glass, the new Art Gallery building carries much of what we might expect from SANAA, but the design also goes out of its way to connect with Sydney. There is the topography, with the circulation of the building taking its cues from the site’s 20-metre drop, and of course the views.

Related: When the new Art Gallery building opened

Materially, however, it’s the 150-metre rammed earth wall that really makes the strongest argument for having achieved a sense of place that is notably Sydney. “It’s really tied into the landscape and climate in every possible way,” notes Brand.

While the older sister building, Naala Nura, can be perceived as intimidating rather than welcoming with its architecture of grandeur and high-culture gravitas, SANAA’s building is all about transparency and openness. “You can see in [to the building] and hopefully you see people like yourself, and you’ll feel comfortable coming in,” says Brand. “When you’re in, one of my goals is that, as you’re engaging with art from both Australia and around the world, you’re engaging with that art in Sydney – with all that means in terms of the history, community, geography and climate of Sydney. I think that does make a difference to experiencing art in a pure white cube where you could be in any number of cities around the world.” On a similar note, one of the most important programmatic moves is to have placed the Yiribana Gallery for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art on the main ground floor level, the first gallery that visitors encounter upon entering.

The post-industrial, subterranean Tank adds a profound point of contrast to the above-ground gallery spaces – “as if revealing a suppressed unconscious memory,” as Pallasmaa puts it. The book provides some tantalising insight into key moments in the design process, from the first time that SANAA’s architects stepped into that space to a hands-on design workshop at their Tokyo studio involving a high number of cardboard models.

“It was only in 2017 that we could take the team down [into the Tank],” explains Brand. “It took a while to get permission and we had to build scaffolding. We went down there in gum boots, there was still about 30 centimetres of water and tree roots were coming down the wall… The original plan had been to mezzanine about a third of it, but once they got down there, they just looked at each other and said: ‘we’re not doing anything down here – this is Sydney’s treasure.'”

For a project that is in many ways unusual for SANAA, the book provides an excellent means of engaging more deeply with a design that has certainly captured the attention of Sydney’s architecture community in recent years. “I’m proud of the whole project, and proud to have had a role in creating something that I really believe is highly significant for Sydney,” concludes Brand.

SANAA in Sydney: The architecture of Naala Badu at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is available here.

Art Gallery of New South Wales
artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Photography (architecture)
Iwan Baan