Gallery posts £900,000 public realm job as part of biggest expansion in its 200-year history
The National Gallery is looking for a landscape architect to work on its proposals for a £375m extension.
The Trafalgar Square institution has posted a tender notice for a £900,000 job lasting almost six years, from 1 May until 31 March 2032.
The appointed team will lead the design of the public realm surrounding the new wing, which is set to be the most significant transformation in the gallery’s 200-year history.
The tender notice comes two months after the gallery unveiled a shortlist of six design teams vying for the scheme’s lead architect role, including Foster & Partners, Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Adamson Associates and Farshid Moussavi with Piercy & Company.
The shortlist also includes Selldorf, the practice behind the controversial overhaul of the gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, Kengo Kuma with BDP and Studio Seilern Architects.
The National Gallery said the landscape team would work from RIBA stages 1 through 7, coordinating interfaces with the lead architect, engineers and specialist consultants.
The role also includes supporting planning and listed building consent processes, highway approvals and engagement with statutory authorities, according to the tender notice.
The gallery is also seeking to appoint an MEP engineer for the new wing on a £3.3m contract, covering the same RIBA stages and contract dates as the landscape architect role.
Both jobs have a deadline of 17 February for requests to participate and are expected to be awarded on 28 April this year.
The scheme will be built to the north of the Sainsbury Wing on the last remaining part of the gallery’s current campus, a 1960s hotel building called St Vincent House which the gallery acquired 30 years ago as part of a long-term expansion strategy.
The project, one of the most prestigious cultural commissions in recent years, has been funded by two of the largest private donations ever received by a museum or gallery anywhere in the world.
Crankstart, a charity founded by billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman, and the Julia Rausing Trust have each donated £150m towards the new wing, with the National Gallery Trust contributing a further £75m.
The new wing is itself part of a wider £750m expansion programme called Project Domani, which is aiming to make the gallery the “only place in the world where visitors can view the entire history of painting in the Western tradition”.
The money will be used to build an acquisition fund for modern artworks, part of a strategy to broaden the gallery’s traditionally pre-1900 collection, and to secure the gallery’s long-term financial stability.
Last year’s announcement of the expansion followed the agreement in principle of a partnership between the gallery and Tate, which will loan artworks to the National Gallery and provide curatorial and conservational expertise for the new displays.
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