Unleash Your Inner Artist: Explore the Creative Haven of Akin Atelier Gallery

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has recently opened its Sydney Modern building, featuring the first-of-its-kind Gallery Shop designed by Akin Atelier. Located in the Entrance Pavilion, the immersive space is a large-scale resin installation that creates shifting perspectives and refractions of light. The bio-resin used in the design was a custom formulation created in collaboration with multi-disciplinary designer Hayden Cox. Akin Atelier worked with Cox for over two years to achieve the complex, large-format application of the resin, pushing shape and volume beyond the normal parameters to best harness light and colour.

The design of the Gallery Shop responds to the large and open volumes of the art museum building, creating focal points of four key precincts: Woolloomooloo, Potts Point, Central Sydney, and the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain. The fluid contours of bio-resin wrap the shop's perimeter to form a transparent margin that serves as both boundary and display. The bubble captures natural light throughout the day, bringing dynamic reflections and refractions of the city while holding people, objects, and books within its centre.

The Gallery Shop's glossy translucency was achieved with 12 grit levels of hand-sanding and seven sand-polishing stages. Each unit required over three weeks of hand-polishing by highly skilled, specialist workers. A total of 29 unique resin modules, each weighing between 300 and 500 kilograms, comprise the installation.

Akin Atelier's choice of resin as the primary material for the Gallery Shop speaks directly to the transparency of SANAA's building design in public spaces. The resin was selected for its texture, dimension, and ability to respond to shifting daylight. The handmade craft of this material allowed for experimentation across colour and form. The colour selection, led by Akin Atelier's creative directors Kelvin Ho and Alexandra Holman, references the sandstone of the original gallery building, and the gradation of tone speaks to the layered nature of Sydney's sandstone geology, acting as a visual continuation of the rammed earth wall present in the gallery volumes of the new building on the levels below.

The Gallery Shop designed by Akin Atelier is the principal retail space of the Art Gallery of NSW's new building. It is conceived as both a retail experience and a sculptural installation achieved through collaborative resin design and materiality exploration with Hayden Cox. The appetite for experimentation in form and materiality has resulted in the realization of an unprecedented application of resin to reflect, experience, and observe. EMAC Constructions handled the mould construction and on-site installation of the innovative project, which was delivered by an all-Australian design, fabrication, and build a team.

Architects: Akin Atelier

Year: 2022

Photographs: Rory Gardiner

Designer: Hayden Cox

City: Sydney

Country: Australia