Description

The Bankside Power Station, an enormous building on the bank of the Thames that was erected in 1947-63 according to plans by Giles Gilbert Scott (the inventor of the red English telephone boxes) and shut down only two decades after it was put into operation, was to be converted into one of the largest museums of modern art. In addition, it was to fulfil an identity-promoting function in a rather neglected urban neighborhood. The architects left the exterior of the imposing brick building largely untouched, with the exception of the new main entrance marked by a spectacular ramp and above all, the two-storey glass ‘lightbox’ on the extended volume. Magically lighted up at night, this offers a formal equivalent to the tall brick tower that once served as a chimney; it also serves for the natural lighting of the uppermost exhibition rooms. Moreover, in addition to service rooms it contains a restaurant with a magnificent view of London’s city centre.

In the interior, almost entirely gutted, leaving only its steel skeleton and brick hull, the original organisation was nonetheless conserved: three spatial layers arranged in parallel, although each has a different number of storeys. A broad ramp leads into what used to be the turbine room, whose floor lies below the water level of the Thames and which with its imposing dimensions (155 metres long, 23 metres wide and 35 metres high) is at the same time both entrance and public square. At the north side it is accentuated by long light sources or open vitrines, apparently floating, jutting far out into the room. These are placed in carefully calculated contrast to the steel pillars of the supporting structure. These horizontal elements conceal some of the more than eighty exhibition rooms of different sizes and heights, which on three floors connect to the hall that has a central distribution function. The appearance of the exhibition rooms, which are lighted in a great variety of ways (and differently in each room) by vertical bands of windows, ceilings illuminated by artificial light or strip lighting recessed flush with the ceiling, is marked by a cleverly staged industrial aesthetics, which is reduced to simple but refined materials such as polished concrete and oak, stainless steel, and frosted glass.

Bauwelt 40-41/1998, pp. 2186-2291 and 23/2000, pp. 27-33 (Hubertus Adam) • Casabella 661/1998, pp. 13-19 (Nicholas Serota) and 684-685/2001, pp. 88-105 (Chiara Baglione) • architektur aktuell 243-244/2000, pp. 40-53 (Roman Hollenstein) • Architectural Record 6/2000, pp. 102-115 and p. 244 (William J.R. Curtis) • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 6/1995, pp. 14-16 (Jochen Wittmann) and 6/2000, pp. 18-19 • Deutsche Bauzeitung 3/ 2000, p. 24 (Oliver Herwig) • Detail 7/2000, pp. 1251-1261 • Schweizer Ingenieur & Architekt 4/2000, pp. 9-14 (Inge Beckel) • Gerhard Mack, Herzog & de Meuron 1992-1996 (The Complete Works, vol. 3), Basel/Boston/Berlin 2000, pp. 90-109 • Rowan Moore/Raymund Ryan, Building Tate Modern, London, 2000

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.