Inside the Switch House – Tate Modern's Power Pyramid
With its chainmail brickwork, vast spaces and panoramic views, the Tate’s £260m ziggurat is a mesmerising twist on the existing art gallery.
23 May 2016
| Lacey Glave
|
via
The Guardian
Among the shafts of luxury flats sprouting up along the south bank of the Thames, from Battersea to Bermondsey, there is one new tower unlike the others.
It is made of brick, not glass, and stands as a squat, truncated pyramid, twisting as it rises. Punctured only by thin slit windows, Tate Modern’s new extension rears up like a defensive watchtower, there to ward off property developers from encroaching any further on the former Bankside power station.
“We realised we were getting vulnerable in terms of what we could do on this site,” says the Tate director Nicholas Serota, explaining the £260m expansion, which has been in the works since the mid-2000s.
Set to open on 17 June, the Tate Modern Switch House – named after the part of the power station that the new galleries occupy – expands the museum by 60% to accommodate the surging numbers of visitors, which reached 5.7 million last year, well over double the number the building was designed to cope with when it opened in 2000.
But the arresting brick ziggurat is also a physical symbol of the effect the Tate has had on its surroundings.
It is made of brick, not glass, and stands as a squat, truncated pyramid, twisting as it rises. Punctured only by thin slit windows, Tate Modern’s new extension rears up like a defensive watchtower, there to ward off property developers from encroaching any further on the former Bankside power station.
“We realised we were getting vulnerable in terms of what we could do on this site,” says the Tate director Nicholas Serota, explaining the £260m expansion, which has been in the works since the mid-2000s.
Set to open on 17 June, the Tate Modern Switch House – named after the part of the power station that the new galleries occupy – expands the museum by 60% to accommodate the surging numbers of visitors, which reached 5.7 million last year, well over double the number the building was designed to cope with when it opened in 2000.
But the arresting brick ziggurat is also a physical symbol of the effect the Tate has had on its surroundings.
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