d+a | Issue 128 • 2023

24 design and architecture #128 institutional kazuyo sejima and ryue nishizawa, Architects and Founders, SANAA 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.