The National Gallery of Australia has announced the winning team for the National Sculpture Garden Design Competition. CO-AP Holdings is a decidedly multidisciplinary offering, with a team comprising CO-AP, Studio JEF, TARN and Plus Minus Design. As we reported back in April, the aim of the competition was to select a design team to create an innovative design incorporating a public place for experiencing art, education, cultural and social events – all while respecting the garden’s original design intent and heritage values. Moreover, central pillars for the required design include resilience in relation to climate crisis and embedding First Nations principles central.

“We’re really thrilled to announce CO-AP as the winners – we were after a team of interesting individuals to come together to respond to the complexity of the site,” says National Gallery Director, Dr Nick Mitzevich. “With CO-AP, we’ve got an extraordinary array of talent coming together. This site has lots of architectural iconography within it – it has lots of gravitas. There are three parts that I loved about CO-AP’s concept: it’s about rectifying and repairing, connection, and newness. Their scheme brought those three things together in such a sophisticated way.”

Dr Mitzevich was one of the jurors and his comments allude to the central, intriguing tension at the heart of the winning design. On one hand, it’s rigorously and conscientiously rooted in context and continuity, a deep and deliberate respect for what is already there. On the other, however, it’s also self-consciously contemporary and transformative.

“We wanted to start with what already existed,” notes Phillip Arnold of Plus Minus Design. “Our intention was to be as respectful as we possibly could, while at the same time being new. We hope that it is part of the existing Gallery – as if it was always going to be there – but it’s also a new contribution.”

Rob Champion from TARN explains further: “It’s transformative too. I think that’s the key – we’re transforming and renewing what’s there, trying to complete elements […] and reconnect all the spaces around the garden into a continuous landscape.”

Related: Naturescapes with Phillip Withers

CO-AP’s interventions are set to include a doubling of space available for public art, while a new permanent pavilion will be added. The latter takes it positional cues from a semi-permanent structure currently placed there, an example of how the design team is allowing the site’s present conditions to guide its future plans. The new structure – a space for exhibitions, events and education programmes – will feature mirror-polished stainless steel and a razor-thin roof profile, again capturing something of the balance between permanence and ephemerality.

This is of course the domain of landscape design, but CO-AP’s scheme also forms a sensitive dialogue with the iconic architecture of the National Gallery. The original 1981 design for the National Gallery Sculpture Garden by landscape architects Harry Howard and Associates alongside Barbara Buchanan and Roger Vidler is itself a response to, and extension of, the triangular geometric spatial configuration of Colin Madigan AO and team’s building.

“One of our key proposals is expanding the existing gardens so that they basically embrace the entire Gallery building on all sides, and that each of these new gardens has its own vegetative and spatial character,” adds Champion. “It’s also about creating a circuit that will link these disparate parts. I think there will be quite a profound effect on how the Gallery and gardens are experienced.”

Will Fung of CO-AP comments: “We all came together to embark on this competition because we all have this deep shared love of the sculpture garden and the National Gallery of Australia. We shared our experiences individually and talked about what we love about the garden, and what became very apparent to us is that we needed to protect its legacy and that whatever we did has to build on those original principles – but not in a derivative or pastiche way.”

The design team explains how they have deliberately factored in a high level of flexibility in order to accommodate further First Nations insights, with the landscape design as a whole presenting itself as an ongoing, living work rather than a ‘set-and-forget’ built form.

“One of the very attractive parts of CO-AP’s scheme was seasonal planting,” says Dr Mitzevich. “Also the long-term care and sustainability plans – it’s very much a landscape that will evolve over many years, and an evolving garden that will require care.”

The National Gallery will now begin working with CO-AP Holdings and key stakeholders to develop a design for National Sculpture Garden over 2025.

CO-AP
co-ap.com

Studio JEF
studiojef.co

TARN
tarn.studio

Plus Minus Design
plusminusdesign.com.au

National Gallery of Australia
nga.gov.au

Read more about the original competition here