Located in the historic, Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Delaware Park, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is one of the major cultural hotspots of New York State's second largest city. Now, the contemporary and modern art gallery plans a major expansion of its facilities, which originally opened in 1905 and later gained an addition designed by Gordon Bushaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

The Albright-Knox Gallery announced a preliminary list of prominent designers, with a plan to select one by mid-June. The firms are:

• Snøhetta
• Bjarke Ingels Group
• OMA
• wHY
• Allied Works Architecture

Unlike with other architectural competitions, the Albright-Knox Galley has not asked the firms to submit a near-finalized design. Instead, they've incorporated a yearlong period into the planning process, in order to foster close collaboration with the chosen architects.

“We’re not in a design competition to choose a design and then build it. We’re in a process of choosing a partner,” Albright-Knox director Janne Sirén told the Buffalo News. “They should not expect the proposal and the renderings that they provide us to be what actually gets done.”

The gallery's "aspirational budget" is $80 million for 50,000 square feet of new exhibition space, as well as a new public space. That much gallery space would put the museum at the same level as the Guggenheim or new Whitney Museum.

According to Sirén, the designers were chosen "because none of them has a fingerprint style.” 

“All of them, almost, specialize in an ability to build for a given context.”

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