Auckland Art Gallery

This guide to Auckland Art Gallery moves between the building's cramped Victorian past, seventeen floor levels stacked into a maze before a four-year renovation stripped it back to six, and the nineteenth-century gifts from George Grey and James Mackelvie that founded the collection in 1888. The redesign, led by architects FJMT with local firm Archimedia, raised a timber canopy over the Kitchener Street entrance shaped like the branches of a kauri forest. Stand beneath it and look up at the curves filtering light the way leaves do on a forest floor.