National Gallery picks Kuma

London’s National Gallery has picked Kengo Kuma and Associates to design a new wing on the St Vincent House site, just north of the Sainsbury Wing, after an international contest that ended on 7 April 2026. The team includes British firms BDP and MICA, and the gallery says the project is part of its £750 million Project Domani plan. (nationalgallery.org.uk) This was not a quiet shortlist exercise. The gallery opened the competition in September 2025, got 65 submissions, cut them to six finalists in December, and chose Kuma over teams that included Foster + Partners, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Selldorf Architects, Farshid Moussavi Architecture, and Studio Seilern. (nationalgallery.org.uk) The building is one piece of a much bigger reset. Project Domani is meant to push the National Gallery’s collection beyond 1900, so the museum can show the full sweep of Western painting in one place instead of stopping at the edge of modern art. (nationalgallery.org.uk) That change needs room, and room is exactly what the gallery has been missing. St Vincent House was bought nearly 30 years ago for future expansion, and the new wing will finally turn that last bit of the campus into galleries, public space, and a new route between Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square. (nationalgallery.org.uk) The price tags tell you how the plan is split. Project Domani as a whole is a £750 million campaign with a new wing, an acquisitions fund for modern paintings, and an endowment, while the new building itself is estimated at about £350 million and is due to open in the early 2030s. (nationalgallery.org.uk) (theartnewspaper.com) The jury did not pick Kuma for spectacle alone. It praised a scheme clad in Portland stone, stepped to fit the surrounding streets, with roof gardens, trees, and links to Leicester Square, while saying the gallery floors would stay in conversation with the Sainsbury Wing rather than trying to outshout it. (nationalgallery.org.uk) (dezeen.com) That matters because the National Gallery has already spent years reworking how people enter and move through the place. In 2022 it unveiled plans to open up the Sainsbury Wing entrance, reduce queues on Trafalgar Square, bring in more daylight, and add lower-level connections so visitors would not have to backtrack through the building to leave. (nationalgallery.org.uk) Kuma’s selection lands just after the gallery’s bicentenary, and the institution is framing the whole effort as its biggest physical change since it was founded in 1824. For a museum best known for Van Eyck, Velázquez, Turner, and Van Gogh, the next argument is no longer whether to grow, but how to add a modern wing without breaking the old front door. (nationalgallery.org.uk)