Sydney Modern (Art Gallery of New South Wales — Naala Badu)

The biggest cultural building Sydney has opened since the Opera House isn’t a single dramatic gesture. It’s a series of low, glass-walled pavilions that step down toward the harbour, almost trying not to compete with the view. Sydney Modern, the A$344 million expansion of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, opened in December 2022 and gave the gallery a second life.

Project Scope

Designed by the Pritzker-winning Japanese studio SANAA with Architectus as executive architect, the project added a new North Building (Naala Badu) while revitalising the original 19th-century South Building and knitting the two together with landscaped public space. The new building nearly doubled the gallery’s exhibition area, and it did something no other Australian public art museum had managed: it earned the highest national rating for sustainable design, a 6 Star Green Star.

The site made the work hard. The pavilions step across a slope above a former wartime oil tank, which the team converted into a vast subterranean gallery, a raw concrete space now used for large-scale installations. Richard Crookes Constructions built it, with Arup handling the engineering. The architecture leans on glass, thin roofs and daylight rather than monumental mass, which is harder to detail and build than it looks. The result won the 2023 Sulman Medal, the New South Wales chapter’s top prize for public architecture.

Why It Matters

Sydney Modern is a model for how cultural institutions grow without erasing what they were. Instead of replacing the old gallery, the project extends it across the site and lets the two eras sit side by side. The reuse of the oil tank, in particular, turned a piece of military infrastructure into one of the most talked-about gallery spaces in the country.

It also raised the bar for sustainability in civic architecture. A naturally lit, low-energy museum at this scale shows that green-rated cultural buildings aren’t a contradiction. For a project funded through a mix of state money and private philanthropy, the payoff is a building that draws visitors and earns its operating case. Exchange covers major cultural builds worldwide, from the Grand Egyptian Museum to the M+ Museum in Hong Kong.

Project Team & Details