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LONDON
The turbine hall stands seven storeys tall and has 3,400 square metres of
floorspace. It is used to display specially-commissioned work by
contemporary artists, between October and March each year. This series
was originally planned to last the gallery's first five years, but the
popularity of the series has led to its extension until 2008.
There is also a riverboat pier just outside the gallery called Bankside Pier, with connections to the Docklands
and Greenwich via regular passenger boat services (commuter service) and the Tate to Tate service, which
connects Tate Modern with Tate Britain via the London Eye.
The Europeans have a talent for finding new uses for old
buildings. In this case, the Tate Modern - an art gallery built
inside a disused power plant. If this was the United States, the
plant would have been leveled in a spectacular implosion, and a
shiny new building erected on the spot. But Britons honor their
heritage. Even if it is an ugly power station, they realize that
sentiments change over the years, and today's discarded hulk of
a structure can emerge like a phoenix as tomorrow's ultra-
modern too-hip-for-you mega tourist attraction
The architects who designed the Tate Modern's conversion and
won in April, 2001 the Pritzker Prize for their work, and whose
plans have highlighed the building's new function while
respecting the integrity of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's original design. The most noticeable change to the exterior of
the building is a new two-storey glass structure or lightbeam spanning the length of the roof which not only
provides natural light into the galleries on the top floors, but also houses a stunning café offering outstanding
views across London.
Out of the six finalists Herzog and de Meuron were the only architects to
suggest leaving the original power station building largely intact, reusing a
significant part of the plan. Their strategy was based on accepting the power
and energy of the original building whilst finding new ways to enhance and
utilize these qualities - a conceptual rather than design-based approach. All of
the original brickwork, windows and chimney have been renovated and
retained. The original 500 foot turbine hall, left intact, became a new dramatic
entrance for the museum as well as providing a vast exhibition space; visitors
enter at one end and descend down a long gradual ramp before being carried
upwards on escalators to the auditorium, shop, café and three floors of galleries
above. The industrial flavor of the building is reflected in the taupe walls and
black steel girders. A new glass ceiling floods the austere space with natural
light, creating an ideal environment for viewing art. Light-filled boxes attached to the sides of this huge space
coincide with openings where visitors can look down on the turbine hall from the galleries above.
Internally Herzog and de Meuron have emphasized the industrial character of the building through their use of
polished concrete, untreated wooden floors and plain light paintwork on the walls contrasting with black
girders. Externally their major edition is the Swiss light, a two-story high glass roof beam that runs the whole
length of the top of the building. This is the outward signal of the building's change in function providing
excellent lighting to the top galleries. It also houses a café that has magnificent views across to St Paul's
Cathedral on the other side of the river. At night this horizontal roof beam provides a distinctive addition to the
London skyline.
The Tate Modern is one of the world's most celebrated
examples of adaptive reuse. The enormous art gallery
was created from the shell of the old. For the
restoration, builders added 3,750 tons of new steel. The
industrial-gray Turbine Hall runs nearly the entire
length of the building. Its 115 foot high ceiling is
illuminated by 524 glass panes.
"It's a space you never could ever have achieved with a
new building," says Rowan Moore, an architecture
critic and author of Building the Tate Modern. "For one
thing they'd never get the money for it, but even if they
did it would seem like a bombastic gesture because
there's all this empty space here."
Speaking of the project, Herzog and de Meuron stated, "It is exciting for us to deal with existing structures
because the attendant constraints demand a very different kind of creative energy. In the future, this will be an
increasingly important issue in European cities. You cannot always start from scratch. We think this is the
challenge of the Tate Modern as a hybrid of tradition, Art Deco and super modernism: it is a contemporary
building, a building for everybody, a building of the 21st century. And when you don't start from scratch, you
need specific architectural strategies that are not primarily motivated by taste or stylistic preferences. Such
preferences tend to exclude rather than include something. Our strategy was to accept the physical power of
Bankside's massive mountain-like brick building and to even enhance it rather than breaking it or trying to
diminish it. This is a kind of Aikido strategy where you use your enemy's energy for your own purposes.
Instead of fighting it, you take all the energy and shape it in unexpected and new ways."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_Modern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankside_Power_Station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Gilbert_Scott
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herzog_%26_de_Meuron
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/building
http://www.glasssteelansstone.com
http://www.highbeam.com
http://architecture.about.com