“It’s a building that could only be in Sydney,” says Art Gallery of New South Wales director Dr Michael Brand. “In the way that the Louvre is a perfect Paris building, and Moma could only be in New York, this is a perfect Sydney art museum.”

The first visitors to Sydney Modern – the $344 million north wing of the Art Gallery of NSW, which opens to the public this weekend – were not donors, members or media. Rather, they were 1500 school students from 52 schools across the state, “from Redfern to Wilcannia”, said the minister for Aboriginal affairs, the arts, regional youth and tourism, Ben Franklin. “It is fitting because art is about access for all.”

“Make no mistake,” Premier Dominic Perrottet told media on Tuesday, “this is the most significant cultural build since the Sydney Opera House [50 years ago].”

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Brand called the new building a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to add to the country’s cultural landscape and an “extraordinary work of architecture”. And while he lauded the building’s warmth and modesty, he also pointed out the complexity of the engineering, inherent in its sloping roofs and slender columns.

The building was designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize–winning architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based firm Sanaa (behind London’s Serpentine Pavilion and the Louvre-Lens Museum in France), with local studio Architectus (Brookfield Place, Barrack Place) as executive architect. It was built by Richard Crookes Constructions. The three limestone-clad pavilions that make up the new building are integrated into the natural landscape – stacked one on top of the other like stairs, following the natural slope of the hill they’re built into. Their courtyards and rooftop art terraces descend from The Domain to Woolloomooloo Bay.

In contrast to the old wing’s classic sandstone facade, the new building is relaxed and accessible. “Our architecture doesn’t have a facade,” architect Nishizawa tells Broadsheet. “There is no border to cross. You can feel the topography and the relationship between the harbour and the hill, and the relationship between the new gallery and the old gallery. You can feel how people move from the top to the bottom of the gallery. You can feel everything.”

Concrete floors and limestone were used heavily, and the 250-metre rammed-earth wall that’s used across two levels was made with materials from across New South Wales.

“They’ve given us a new type of art museum,” Brand says of Sanaa. “Deeply rooted in a sense of place, inspired by its site, warm in its embrace, fluid in its paths of circulation, thrilling in its sight lines and offering a multiplicity of experiences.”

The new wing almost doubles the gallery’s exhibition space. Brand says that one of the most important curatorial decisions was elevating the Yiribana gallery – dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art – from the lowest level of the old building to the entrance level of the new building, placing it front and centre, “where it should be”. Visitors to the gallery are immediately greeted by the work of Worimi artist Genevieve Grieves, whose five-channel digital video, Picturing the Old People, reimagines colonial photographs from an Indigenous perspective.

In a win for gender parity, 53 per cent of the works hung in the new wing are by women, including five of the nine site-specific commissions. Among the most striking are two mighty sculptures by New Zealand artist Francis Upritchard in the Welcome Plaza, and fellow Kiwi artist Lisa Reihana’s video installation Groundloop, which plays on a 20-metre-long screen in the central atrium.

“These are stories told in a multiplicity of voices from a multitude of places, but they are all told from Sydney,” Brand says. “And I am pleased to say that they are told for free, with free admission.”

The new wing also features a gallery dedicated to time-based art, as well as the Tank: a sprawling subterranean exhibition space accessed by an internal spiral staircase. Every year, the Tank – a fuel bunker built in 1942 that once held 10 million litres of oil to fuel Allied ships in WWII – will be transformed by a new artist.

Argentine-Peruvian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas was entrusted with the space’s inaugural commission, The End of Imagination. The spiral staircase becomes progressively darker as you descend, so your eyes adjust to the extreme darkness in which his haunting sculptures are set. Reserve a good amount of time to spend in the Tank, and hold onto any wander-prone children – it’s like taking a walk through the Upside Down.

Franklin says the 2200-square-metre space, with its soaring seven-metre ceilings and 125 pillars, will rival the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern and the Guggenheim in New York. “It will be one of the most important exhibition spaces in the world.”

Tawainese-American contemporary artist Lee Mingwei’s contemplative installation Spirit House is accessed via a door cut out of the rammed-earth wall and is designed to be experienced alone. Inside the domed space, a bench faces a figure of the Buddha. Every day, one stone is placed inside the Buddha’s hands. The person who finds the stone is invited to take it along with them during their journey through the gallery, and asked to return it when they’re finished.

“It’s really about fate,” Mingwei tells Broadsheet. “It’s unusual, as people are not often asked to take things from a museum.”

The gallery opens tomorrow, October 3, with more than 15,000 visitors registered to visit over its opening weekend. The opening program features exhibitions, displays and new commissions from more than 900 Australian and international artists across both the old and new buildings, and the new outdoor spaces. There will also be a nightly drone show designed by Kamilaroi artist Reko Rennie over Woolloomooloo Bay, and a free concert in The Domain on December 10 featuring Ellie Goulding, Meg Mac and Electric Fields.

The opening celebrations run from December 3 to 11, with opening hours at both buildings extended until 10pm each night.

artgallery.nsw.gov.au