Tate Modern Museum
London GB
Herzog & de Meuron
2000
Type
Museum
Tags
public spaces, renovations, cultural facilities, postindustrial spaces , global cultural institutions, spaces for tourism, spaces of encounter, art spaces , second life, by the Thames, 200Best, found objects
Visitability
Allowed
Description
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.The ramp is one of the main architectural modifications involved in converting this industrial building, once closed to the public, into a museum that daily attracts thousands of visitors.The ramp is not only an entrance but a prominent meeting point, like the tower to the north and the gate to the south, which will be opened to the public in a later building phase. The location acts as a meeting point due to an architectural strategy which does not treat the gigantic complex, originally built by Giles Gilbert Scott, as a closed shell, but has instead transformed it into a landscape with different topographies that visitors can approach and use from all four directions.(Description provided by the architects)