This newly completed contemporary gallery is home to the City of Gold Coast’s extensive collection of art and cultural artefacts. It will host local and international exhibitions.
HOTA Gallery is located on the land of the Kombumerri families of the Yugambeh Language Region.
The building is the third realised element of our HOTA (Home of the Arts) masterplan, which transforms a Gold Coast governmental site into a mammoth cultural and landscape precinct.
It opened to the public on 8 May 2021.
Each of the six gallery spaces is digitally enabled, immersive and destinational with 5m ceilings and roof-loading capability. Gallery 1 is a 1,000m² AAA-rated exhibition hall: fully climate controlled for national and international touring exhibitions.
The Gallery overlooks the Outdoor Stage across the expansive amphitheatre lawn between.
We completed the masterplan in 2013, in partnership with landscape architects TOPOTEK1, and are now realising it in stages.
The masterplan converts ageing cultural infrastructure and redundant commercial buildings into an arts and recreation precinct for Australia’s largest-growing city.
Like its neighbour, our HOTA Outdoor Stage, the Gallery is covered in a 3D Voronoi—a cellular-looking web laid over the entire HOTA site to bring unity and distinctiveness.
At 5,500 m², it’s one of Australia’s largest regional galleries.
“To have a project of this complexity constructed on budget and on time, and through the chaos of a COVID year, is absolutely exceptional.”
—Professor Ned Pankhurst, HOTA Board Chair
Unusually, HOTA is a vertical gallery. You start on Level 6 and work your way down through the exhibitions. You’ll find panoramic views of the HOTA precinct and the Gold Coast from vantage points along the way.
The HOTA precinct is unified visually by the dynamic, organic cellular structure of the Voronoi, nature’s most robust but delicate shape. It’s a distinctive design motif that has determined the shapes on the walls, canopy, paths and garden beds of the Outdoor Stage.
A Voronoi diagram is a network of cells that occurs naturally in many plants and animals—even honeycombs and bubbles.
We have used it on other projects including the Wintergarden, the Melbourne Recital Centre and, of course, the HOTA Outdoor Stage. Voronoi shapes in nature adapt and shift in response to external change—this is a perfect structure for a cultural precinct that reflects the furious, youthful energy of Australia’s sixth biggest city.
“This is a beautiful, durable and functional design, offering a breathtaking rooftop experience, which will ensure the gallery becomes a cultural beacon…”
—Tom Tate, Mayor, City of Gold Coast