In April this year, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Kamberri/Canberra launched an international design competition, calling expressions of interest from multidisciplinary teams from Australia and abroad to reimagine the gallery’s three-hectare sculpture garden.

In what will be the largest investment in the NGA’s grounds for more than four decades, the competition scope was to design a $60-million revamp of the existing sculpture garden, which connects the gallery and Lake Burley Griffin.

Teams were asked to include a landscape architect, an Australian First Nations practitioner, an artist, architect, and botanist or horticulturalist to devise an innovative and imaginative concept that incorporated art, education, and cultural awareness with public spaces.

The EOI expressed a preference for concepts that responded to issues of sustainability, climate change, and accessibility, and that recognised the foundational importance of Australia’s First Nations peoples and culture.

The brief asked applicants to reposition the existing Sculpture Garden as an outdoor art gallery that comprehensively embraced the biodiversity of the Australian landscape, while promoting the gallery’s credo to make art accessible, meaningful and vital to diverse audiences.

Our team’s proposal sought to create a “living commons” out of the existing landscape helping to unify and integrate the NGA Sculpture Garden. In considering their response, the team formed a series of manifesto points that informed their design thinking.

“Deep listening is at the heart of our shared approach to this conceptual framework of Respect, Revitalise and Reveal,” the design team said. “These imperatives are scaffolding for open and creative dialogue, providing a set of preliminary principles for the project to structure our key ideas.”

Supporting the interaction of humans and the natural world, the gardens have been imagined as a “fluid confluence of the different geological, hydrological, infrastructural, cultural, recreational, and economic landscapes”, the design team said.

The team saw an opportunity to use the Molonglo River as a conduit for connection and continuity, proposing the creation of a “water pavilion”, displacing a portion of the man-made Lake Burley Grifin and redepositing it within the sculpture garden.  

The water pavilion provides an event and performance space in a unique spectacle that transposes water from the lake to make the roof and walls of the pavilion. Acting as a functional piece of environmental infrastructure, the structure will clean the water and return it to the lake in better condition.

In its place, a “water void” would reveal part of the lakebed, creating a tactile landscaped amphitheatre beneath the lake’s surface, thus revealing Country that had long been hidden beneath the man-made reservoir.    

Leveraging off of Ngunnawal Country intelligence and Aboriginal stewardship, the design has been conceived as an immersive educational experience, fostering a relationship between Country and visitor.

“The garden’s spatial armature will be practical, enticing, grounding and insightful, proposing a sequence of meaningful site interventions to heal, engage, question and reveal the layers of the site,” the design team said. “These site interventions will focus on remediating the disconnected attributes, and in doing so, will reveal special knowledge through experience.”

The winning design for the National Sculpture Garden was announced on 17 October, with selected design created by a consortium comprising CO-AP, JEF, TARN and Plus Minus Design.

The jury comprised architect and chair of the Heritage Council of Victoria Philip Goad; National Gallery director Dr Nick Mitzevich; Barkandji artist and curator Nici Cumpston, and renowned Chilean landscape architect Teresa Moller.

Read more about the winning design here.  

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Isla Sutherland
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