American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson and Seattle-based firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) will design landscape elements for the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s Sydney Modern expansion project. Gustafson and GGN will work with project architect, SANAA, and landscape architect, McGregor Coxall on the design of the elements, which build on McGregor Coxall’s overall landscape plan.
Gustafson and GGN will design the gallery’s new public art garden which incorporates the entry plaza of the gallery’s new SANAA-designed building, and the revitalization of the existing 19th century building’s original grand forecourt.
The art garden will occupy the area between the gallery’s new and existing buildings, and provide a shaded link between the two, improved pedestrian access between Woolloomooloo, The Domain and the city, and enhanced sightlines to surrounding parkland, city and harbour. The garden will feature a gently sloping circular space at its centre for informal recreation and spaces for gallery-related programming and events.
The Sydney Modern project includes the revitalisation of the existing gallery building and its forecourt. The redeveloped forecourt will feature an additional 852 square metres of public space, to be created through the removal of car parking bays. Gustafon will design two polished-stone reflecting pools for the forecourt. The stone heritage walls in front of the existing building will also be adapted and reused to provide communal seating for the space.
McGregor Coxall’s overall landscape plan for the Sydney Modern project will create a “unified art museum campus” that connects the gallery’s buildings, creates opportunities for the integration of artworks and offers a series of open spaces and gardens, publicly accessible by day and night. The plan aims to increase the site’s biodiversity and will include endemic plantings of Australian native species that reference flora that previously existed on the site. The expansion will also increase the number of trees on the campus by more than 70 percent, with an additional 381 trees projected, once the expansion is completed in 2022.
McGregor Coxall founding principal Adrian McGregor said: “The planting strategy for the Sydney Modern Project draws upon endemic ecological communities that give Sydney Harbour its rich character. Our design [will] reintroduce coastal sandstone gully, foreshore forest and woodland plantings to the [site].”
Gustafon is a partner at Seattle-based firm Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN) and London-based practice Gustafson Porter and Bowman. Among her notable projects are the 100-hectare Eiffel Tower Park currently under way in Paris, the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall in Washington, DC, the Lurie Garden at Chicago’s Millennium Park, Valencia’s Parque Central in Spain and the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in London. Gustafson was the recipient of the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award in 2019.
