Dangrove Art Storage Facility Tzannes

The old manufacturing areas of southern Sydney are intriguing pieces of inner urban fabric. Emphatically industrial in urban scale and character, their proximity to the city centre has made them an obvious target for the city’s recent growth. The infiltration of parts of this industrial grain with new housing, public spaces and institutions has seen it acquire a charged ambivalence, with the coexistence of contrasting types and uses forming a very particular, and under-appreciated, transitional urban character.

Alexandria was selected by Judith Neilson as the site for the Dangrove Art Storage Facility, designed by Tzannes. The label “art storage facility” strains ironic credulity as soon one begins to confront the cultural ambition of both the institution and its architecture. The facility is extraordinary in every sense: 10,500 square metres of floor area holding 2,750