Arts writer HELEN MUSA and photographer SILAS BROWN come face-to-face with the new National Portrait Gallery.

THE buzz is that it is the most significant building constructed in the Parliamentary Triangle for the last 20 years, but one of the first things people have been asking about new $73.6 million National Portrait Gallery, architect Graham Dix says, is “where is its address?”
Good question, as anyone associated with the brouhaha over the front entrance to the nearby National Gallery of Australia will know.
Dix is a director of the Sydney architecture practice Johnson Pilton Walker, the firm chosen to design the 14,000sqm gallery and he readily acknowledges that the building has “so many front doors”.
“We’ve simply taken a different route,” he notes, from the grand buildings alongside the new gallery in the Parliamentary Triangle, though the concrete and bush-hammered finish of the new building links it with the native Australian materials used in both the High Court and the NGA. 

A part of the idea was to break down the impression of a national institution by striving to “create a note of informality behind the formality”. 
And though you might enter from the underground car park, or the National Gallery via the High Court there really is an entry forecourt, subtly hidden behind the rather austere King Edward Terrace façade. The moment get you get behind it, there is an informal entrance plaza featuring little touches of the bush in its corrugated iron eaves and roof struts reminiscent of a shearing shed. 
But you have to look hard to see those touches, for this is an unobtrusively subtle and sophisticated building, built by John Holland Pty Ltd and funded by the Federal Government under former Prime Minister John Howard.
One of the things that Dix and the founding director of JPW, Richard Johnson, had in mind was that this was essentially a hanging gallery. Although there are well known, three-dimensional objects in the NPG holdings, such as the Ned Kelly death mask, their brief was to provide for 450 to 500 portraits to be hung. 
Everything in the new gallery will be light and airy and so far, Dix says, the use of reflected light to enhance some areas seems to work extremely well. Environmentally friendly control of the atmosphere within the site necessitated high-performance glazing, but for safety of works there will be screening blinds and blackout blinds similar to those in the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.
So what were the architects’ main aims for the gallery?  “I wanted it to feel like an extremely comfortable place to be,” Dix says.
To that end, the new gallery opens with “Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape” curated by director Andrew Sayers, Sarah Engledow and Wally Caruana, and “My Favourite Australian,” a collaborative project with the ABC, the Australia Council for the Arts and the Nelson Meers Foundation.
On the weekend of December 6 and 7, there will be “The Festival of the Face” and until December 13 there will be “My Generation,” a performance work about social scenes in Sydney in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s by William Yang, commissioned by the gallery for the opening festivities.