National Gallery

Officially opened on 24 November 2015, the new Gallery integrates both the refurbished City Hall and former Supreme Court buildings to become Singapore’s largest visual arts venue and museum. With over 8,000 artworks, the Gallery is home to the world’s largest collection of Southeast Asian art.

Trika, the appointed museum showcase manufacturer became a part of a multi-faceted team to deliver this monumental project. Our task – to deliver 32 high-specification custom-designed museum conservation showcases for multiple galleries sited in the two buildings.

Working closely with the museum team, we designed and crafted the showcases to be inserted into wall niches, placed along doorways and corridors to suit specific gallery exhibits. Many design firsts were made possible in the Gallery’s showcases to fulfil stringent conservation parameters set by the Heritage Conservation Centre which tested all our cases. These included fully flushed baseboards to case profile frames, self-closing safety elements for large heavy-duty drawers and customised fibre optics lighting for cases converted from heritage tables dating back to the 19th century.

As an example, a five-metre long map case, comprising four separate cases, was assembled within a 2.5-tonne metal frame. Anti-reflective glass were security bonded on- site with fully mitred joints at 45 degrees. Various compartments for concealing all functional equipment, such as fibre optics lighting systems, soft-closing mechanisms, passive artsorb ventilators, electronic controls for opening and even a touch-screen table-top were incorporated in this multi-tier assembly.

Built between 1926 and 1929, City Hall and the former Supreme Court buildings were imposing symbols of British colonial architecture. With this in mind, Trika has delivered an adaptive body of contemporary showcases, designed to complement the Gallery’s architectural style and colonial heritage.

Showcases were submitted to a battery of airtightness and conservation material tests to ensure that these were fit for the purpose of displaying fragile artifacts consisting of ancient maps, paintings and scrolls with most going back to more than a hundred years old.

The specialist team from Singapore’s Heritage Conservation Centre (HCC) used a series of test methods, ODDY Test amongst one of them. Airtightness for cases deployed in the Southeast Asia Galleries were paramount especially with the old Supreme Courts being repurposed as a dedicated international museum and art gallery.