Kengo Kuma for National Gallery
Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has been announced to design a new wing for London’s National Gallery, a high‑profile commission that will reshape how the museum displays collections. (The social roundup called out Kuma’s design announcement as part of a flurry of architectural and institutional news circulated this week). (x.com) (x.com).
London’s National Gallery picked Kengo Kuma and Associates, working with BDP and MICA, to design a new wing on 7 April 2026 after an international competition, and the museum says the project sits inside a £750 million plan called Project Domani. (nationalgallery.org.uk) This is not a side building or a lobby refresh. The National Gallery calls it the biggest change to the museum since its founding in 1824, and says the new wing will help reorganize how visitors move through the collection. (nationalgallery.org.uk) The collection problem is simple: the National Gallery has long ended its story of painting around 1900, while Tate Modern takes over much of the twentieth century. Project Domani is meant to push the National Gallery’s own display beyond 1900 so visitors can follow Western painting in one place without that hard stop at the turn of the century. (nationalgallery.org.uk) That shift means the museum needs different rooms, different circulation, and a different bridge between old and new parts of the building. Early images released by the Gallery show a new wing linked back to the existing museum by an elevated connection above a reworked public route called Jubilee Walk. (theartnewspaper.com) Kengo Kuma is the Japanese architect behind projects like the Victoria and Albert Museum Dundee in Scotland and Japan’s National Stadium in Tokyo, and his buildings are often known for layered screens, softened edges, and heavy use of natural materials. The National Gallery’s jury said his team offered a design that was both “elegant” and “sensitive” to Trafalgar Square. (nationalgallery.org.uk) (dezeen.com) The site makes the commission unusually tricky because the museum sits on Trafalgar Square, one of London’s most exposed civic spaces, and any addition has to live beside William Wilkins’s nineteenth-century main building and the postmodern Sainsbury Wing by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In central London terms, this is like being asked to add a room to a house that is already part monument, part argument about architecture. (nationalgallery.org.uk) (dezeen.com) The competition was crowded before Kuma won it. The Art Newspaper reported that 65 architects entered, six teams were shortlisted in December 2025, and the new building itself is expected to cost about £350 million, with opening targeted for the early 2030s. (theartnewspaper.com) (nationalgallery.org.uk) The museum has already been testing how far it can change its front door. The Sainsbury Wing reopened in May 2025 after a separate redesign tied to the bicentenary, with changes aimed at making the entrance easier to find, bringing in more daylight, and reducing the queues that used to clog the pavement outside. (nationalgallery.org.uk 1) (nationalgallery.org.uk 2) So the Kuma commission is really the second half of a larger rewrite. First the Gallery changed how people enter the museum; now it is changing where the story of painting goes next, with a new wing built to carry the collection past 1900 and into the early twenty-first century. (nationalgallery.org.uk 1) (nationalgallery.org.uk 2)
