Blending into site: Sydney Modern

Sydney has a new art gallery, the Sydney Modern. By calling the new wing of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) “modern,” the AGNSW is distinguishing the new from the old, drawing on art historical terms. Reviewing a project that calls itself “modern” in an issue dedicated to “innovation” begs inquiry into the two words, which pivot around time. When treating them as adjectives, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “modern” as “relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past” and “innovative” as “featuring new methods [or] advanced and original.” Modern architecture and landscape architecture in the twentieth century defined itself both ideologically, on the basis of its rejection of the past; and technologically, on the basis of methods and technologies that were novel or new. Located nearby Sydney Harbour – adjacent to the Royal Botanic Garden and sited on the eastern edge of the Domain that falls away to Woolloomooloo – Sydney Modern sits in a historically and ecologically rich site, the key “innovation” of the project being the use of horticultural technology to embed the project in its site and engage its context.

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Although the indoor and outdoor spaces appear to merge, the relationship is largely visual to maintain a dry and secure interior.

Image: Brett Boardman

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The historically and ecologically rich site of the Sydney Modern borders the eastern edge of the Domain and is adjacent to the Royal Botanic Garden.

Image: Brett Boardman

The expanded campus of the AGNSW features the original sandstone gallery building; the tasteful new forecourt by Kathryn Gustafson of Gustafson Guthrie Nicol; and the new Sydney Modern building by SANAA and Architectus, with a suspended landscape – almost completely on roofs and over roadways – by McGregor Coxall. One of the most commonly used photographs of the Sydney Modern is an aerial oblique image that shows a series of large architectural masses sprawling – perhaps tumbling – down the slope. However, this view of the project confuses rather than clarifies its site operation: from my on-the-ground experiences navigating the many circulation routes through and around the building, it was difficult to separate the building and the landscape from each other.

A project designed in section as much as in plan, Sydney Modern creates a new site, its entrance a land bridge over the Eastern Distributor that spans a deep cut in Sydney sandstone. Starting with the entry plaza topped with a polycarbonate canopy, scale is immediately revealed as a plaything for the project, the large figures of Francis Upritchard’s Here Comes Everybody “stooping” to fit beneath the roof. On entering the building, the strategy becomes clear: pavilions below roofs, on terraces that span inside and outside and dramatically step down the slope. It is a breathtaking and exhilarating experience in which the site seems elusive: glimpsed and alluded to, but never completely revealed.

As the medium that negotiates the building’s relationship to, in and as site, the landscape strategy is pervasive but subtle, rather than the project’s visual focus in itself. Instead, the design team has crafted the circulation to create connections to the project’s context, while planting is used to clothe the building structure and weave it further into the site. The resulting landscape-building extends tentacle-like into its context, with pedestrian access around the gallery on both its north and south sides linking down the slope to Woolloomooloo. Indoor spaces merge into outdoor spaces as one moves through the site, carried along escalators, stepping through doorways and onto terraces framed by vegetation. That these relationships are mostly visual reveals an inherent contradiction between the gallery’s securable interior and visually interrelated exterior that is continuous, but tantalisingly inaccessible.

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The design team crafted Sydney Modern’s circulation to create connections to the project’s context.

Image: Brett Boardman

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A series of pavilions and terraces steps down the slope; green roofs are among the key technologies of the project.

Image: Brett Boardman

The majority of the landscape for Sydney Modern comprises green roof, a key technical component of the project’s delivery and integration with site. Reflecting on the “modern” in the project’s title, it’s interesting to note that SANAA and Architectus’s building features three of Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture: pilotis (columns), an open floor plan and facade and, notably for landscape, a roof garden. It’s also interesting that despite becoming a ubiquitous and common technology in urban greening, green roof technology still feels innovative today, some 100 years after Corb’s original essay. With the requirement to waterproof an interior and provide soil for plants, the core roof section for today’s green roofs remains essentially unchanged since Modernism: a waterproof membrane with a drainage cell on top that is separated from the growing media above it by a geotextile and is finished with a hardwood mulch. The Sydney Modern building features thin columns and tall volumes; minimizing weight on the roof was vital, and soil depth for growing plants was limited to 150 mm throughout. Working with soil consultants SESL, a specific lightweight soil medium for on-slab planting was developed using low-density minerals. This potting mix provided a guaranteed wet density and consistent loading for engineering performance.

The minimal soil depth necessitated a planting strategy that emphasized fibrous, shallow root systems, which lead in turn to grasses comprising the core planting palette. To preserve as many of the trees adjacent to the site as possible, the design team opted for a selection of predominantly Sydney sandstone species. Erring on the side of performance in plant selection and taking (on the whole) a mass planting approach has created a lush field of grasses on the building’s roofs and well-developed beds on the building’s edges that manage to blend the structure’s architectural bulk into the adjacent streetscape in an easy and unselfconscious way.

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As you walk the many paths and circulation routes, it is difficult to separate the building and landscape from one another.

Image: Brett Boardman

Landscape is always a risky proposition because it features a collection of individual organisms that don’t necessarily perform as predictably as inorganic materials. Indeed, this is what makes landscape so interesting, albeit apt to induce nail-biting; and it is here where innovations in horticultural technology have the potential to enable new relationships to site. In contrast with the “high-tech” technology linked with Modernism, at Sydney Modern, the landscape innovation resides in the cultivation of the very site relationships that Modernism denied. By combining Modern green roof technologies with innovative planting methods, the designers of Sydney Modern have created a new space for art that is embedded in its site and its adjacent natures.