MSB building had been retained. Architect Philip Cox, designer of The Star, Sydney casino on the nearby Pyrmont waterfront, who called the addition "bland architecture of old with the bland architecture of new", told Marshall at a debate that the MCA building should have been demolished, as the SANAA plan had proposed, so the museum could start afresh: "There was a one in 500-year opportunity to do a great building at Circular Quay." Marshall allowed that if he could have demolished the MCA building, he would have. Anderson, the architect who had supervised the original adaptation of the MSB into the MCA, was also unimpressed with the addition, calling it "insensitive" to the original building. "As you get closer and closer to a building there should be finer details that hold the eye and delight. With this building as you move closer there is nothing more to see", he told the Herald. He was also critical of the building's lack of windows on its north and east faces. "That's the most iconic view in Sydney ignored." 2012–2019: Growth With the new addition completed, museum attendance in 2012 reached nearly 850,000, a 31 per cent increase from the last time it had been fully opening two years prior. In 2015 the Herald noted that the MCA had become as popular with museumgoers as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, despite receiving much less government funding. In the years afterward, the MCA began exceeding a million visitors annually, with a new record of 1.1 million in 2018, more than London's Serpentine Galleries and Beijing's UCCA Center for Contemporary Art attracted that same year. International and younger visitors account for significant shares of the MCA visitation, at 40 and 46 per cent respectively. In 2019 McGregor, recalling the beginning of her career driving a traveling contemporary art exhibit around Scotland in a bus, told The Art Newspaper that "I have a great belief that contemporary art should and could be for everyone." To that end, she hired around 84 working artists for the museum's visitor services team, particularly in the front of the house and as educators. "We are probably the largest employer of artists in Australia," says Mordant. "I think that is one reason for our success—we place artists at the centre of everything we do." The artists on staff who interact with the public are also trained to make the