Description

Extending one of your own signature buildings is a task that architects only rarely face. In 2004, some four years after the opening of the Tate Modern in the shell of the former Bankside Power Station on the south bank of the Thames, Herzog & de Meuron found themselves faced with this challenge and produced the first sketches for a new extension to replace the former Switch House. The extension, which cost around £260 million, contains 21,000 square metres spread across eleven storeys in a twisted, pyramidal structure that extends 64.5 metres into the sky and effectively doubles the exhibition space of the gallery.

The new volume presents an adequate third element to the complex that, despite its eccentric appearance, manages to balance the horizontality of the 200-metre-long power station and the slender verticality of the nearly 100-metre-high chimney and at the same time joins in the concert of strange building forms that have populated but not always graced the London skyline over the past decade. Like the two historical elements of the Tate Modern, the new building is brick clad, using a brick of almost the same colour. The brickwork one sees is not, however, a conventional masonry facade but rather an open mesh of paired-brick modules applied as facing ornamentation whose character changes over the course of the day.

The presence that the new building exudes, despite its location behind the main building of the Tate when seen from the city, is significant, not least because the extension explicitly connects the Tate Modern to the surrounding district of Southwark. Sixteen years ago, the area behind the Tate was a somewhat run-down mix of industrial buildings and mostly uninspiring housing. Today, the glazed residential towers in the immediate vicinity of the Tate Modern are an expression of the unmistakable transformation of the area in recent years, and the influence that the art institution and the five million people who visit it every year – more than twice as many as expected – have had on the neighbourhood. The new extension encloses a forecourt – designed, like that of the ‘old’ Tate, by the Zurich-based Vogt landscape architects – that allows visitors to enter both the old building and the new extension from the entrance to the south.

On entering, visitors are immediately drawn to the arcing form of the concrete staircase at the junction between old and new that winds down to the level below of the former oil tanks, which was opened to the public in 2012. All that is visible below the new extension are the inclined supports of the east façade from the passage through to the turbine hall. After that, however, the visitor must decide between the Boiler House, the main building, and the Switch House (the extension). The next opportunity to change course is beneath the roof of the turbine hall via a bridge that offers an impressive view of the large hall and its special exhibition.

Those who choose the new extension quickly grasp the concept of the pyramidal form: the floor area decreases with each level from the ground level functions such as the shop and café and the predominantly enclosed gallery spaces on levels 1 to 3 through to the less frequented internal spaces on levels 4 to 7, and finally the public restaurant and viewing platform at the top, whose view is enough to attract visitors who may not have come for modern art alone. The staircase likewise becomes narrower, arcing only on its way down to the lower ground floor. The planar surface of the exterior is visible from within – as are its constituent layers – and acquires a corresponding spatial three-dimensionality in which the robust concrete of the window framing becomes particularly apparent. The furniture and furnishings were developed and selected together with Jasper Morrison with whom the architects also worked on the ‘old’ section of the Tate Modern.

Originally published in Bauwelt 30.2016, pp. 16-21, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

---