SANAA was selected in 2015 as the result of a multistage invited competition. The building’s stepped form allows for many rooftop terraces. Luke Johnson, a principal at Architectus, the Australian practice that served as executive architect, captures the ensemble’s essence, aptly and approvingly describing it as “scattered cards,” adding that its “looseness and casualness reflect a sense of place.” The building is less playful than SANAA’s organically shaped and meandering “river” at Grace Farms, in New Canaan, Connecticut and less geometrically pure than the firm’s Kanazawa Museum of Contemporary art in Japan (2004), but no less appropriate to its site. From there, you realize that the SANAA project is not one pavilion but a series of interlocking volumes in glass and white Portuguese limestone, topped with overlapping roofs that appear to tumble down the steeply sloping site from the botanic gardens toward the water. One begins to appreciate the scale of these ambitions when the expansion is viewed from its “back,” from Woolloomooloo, a neighborhood east of the Art Gallery, over one of the many small inlets extending from the harbor. The institution’s existing building sits to the south, behind a neoclassical sandstone facade.
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