This morning, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) announced that the team of KPMB Architects with Omar Gandhi Architect, Jordan Bennett Studio, Elder Lorraine Whitman (NWAC), Public Work and Transsolar has won the international design competition for the new Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and Waterfront Arts District.
The new gallery and arts district, located on the Salter Block of the Halifax Waterfront, will be a transformative, inclusive destination. It is intended to inspire and celebrate creativity and imagination, but also to challenge the status quo and reshape institutional values. Its design places people, art and culture at its core.
The winning team is the result of the largest international design competition to be held in Nova Scotia. The other finalist teams were Architecture49 with Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Hargreaves Jones; and DIALOG, Acre Architects, Brackish Design Studio and Shannon Webb-Campbell. The winning design team?s submission features a striking peaked hat shape at the entrance, an iconic shape which a symbol of the strength, wisdom, love and power that women hold within Mi?kmaw communities.
The design offers an array of accessible experiences for all senses, and embodies a vision of a place that thrives throughout all seasons. The landscape design expands and contracts, flexing seasonally from the human-scaled, intimate gathering spaces at the heart of Salter Block to a large gathering space at the scale of K?jipuktuk, the Great Harbour...