SANAA in Sydney

This important new book celebrates the design of SANAA’s new building for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney led by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.

The building, which opened to the public in December 2022, is the culmination of a decade-long vision – the Sydney Modern Project – to transform a 152-year-old public institution into an art museum campus with a seamless connection between art, architecture and landscape. It is Australia’s newest and most significant cultural landmark of the 21st century.

Richly illustrated, SANAA in Sydney takes readers behind the scenes of this ambitious project – from the international architecture competition, through the design and construction process, to the building’s opening – and offers reflections on its built form and engagement with art, people and the environment. It includes a design statement by SANAA architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa along with texts by the Art Gallery’s director, Michael Brand; director of Kanazawa’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Yuko Hasegawa; professor of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Anthony Burke; Harvard University architectural historian Eve Blau; and the Art Gallery’s head of the Sydney Modern Project, Sally Webster. Design competition jurist, architect and academic, Juhani Pallasmaa, has authored the foreword. The book also reunites SANAA’s founders with Iwan Baan, one of architecture’s most sought-after photographers.

SANAA in Sydney will be promoted as part of an architecture symposium and celebrations marking the one-year anniversary of the building’s opening in 2023, and through the Art Gallery’s media channels

About the Editor

Michael Brand is the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where he has led the transformation and expansion of the institution through the Sydney Modern Project. Prior to his appointment at the Art Gallery in 2012, he was the director of the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Brand is a scholar of Indian and Islamic art, architecture and landscape, and is recognised as a prominent voice in the global conversation about the future of art museums.