OMA won the competition for the expansion of the museum in Quebec

The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has won the competition for a major expansion of the Quebec National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBAQ). The new building in the city center, consisting of three protruding blocks, will be OMA's first realized project in Canada.
The winner of the invited competition was announced today by museum president Pierre Lassonde and Quebec Minister of Culture Christine St-Pierre. The design, developed under the leadership of OMA partners Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu in collaboration with associate Jason Long, was selected from five anonymous competition entries submitted by renowned firms.
The new MNBAQ building, with a floor area of 12,000 m², will be located on Quebec's main promenade, Grande-Allée, next to St. Dominic's Church. It will connect to the three existing museum buildings underground. The goal of the design was to integrate the building into the surrounding park and create new connections with the city. Three different-sized volumes stacked on top of each other – a gallery for temporary exhibitions of contemporary art (50 x 50 m), a collection of contemporary art (45 x 35 m), and a space for design exhibitions and a collection of Inuit art (42.5 x 25 m) – rise above the park and create dramatically projecting cantilevers over Grande-Allée. Their base consists of a 14 m high atrium.
Shohei Shigematsu commented on the design: "Our aim was to create a dramatic new form in the city that would still respect and not disturb the surroundings and the existing museum buildings. The resulting form of the three shifting masses allowed us to solve the operational aspects of the building very clearly while bringing plenty of natural daylight into the galleries."
The project is now being developed by OMA's New York office in collaboration with Provencher Roy + Associés Architectes. The expected completion date is the end of 2013.