This lecture examines the transformation of London’s Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern and traces the architectural, representational, and urban negotiations that accompanied the project from its origins around the turn of the millennium to its later expansion.
Beginning with the international competition for the conversion of the former power station, the lecture considers the early proposals and the approach ultimately developed by Herzog & de Meuron. Rather than treating the project simply as the conversion of an industrial building into a museum, we will explore how the architects identified and amplified the existing character of the power station, working through questions of monumentality, materiality, circulation, and the relationship between the old industrial structure and its new cultural role.
The discussion then moves to the subsequent development of Tate Modern, including the proposals and construction of the extension conceived by Herzog & de Meuron in the following decade. The extension provides an opportunity to examine how the architectural language of the original intervention was reconsidered as the museum grew, and how the relationship between the institution, the city, and its increasingly large public was renegotiated.
Alongside the buildings themselves, the lecture will consider architectural representation and the production of architectural images, including an interview with the specialist responsible for Herzog & de Meuron’s visualisations, published by FRAME. This offers a parallel perspective on the project: not only how the architecture was conceived and built, but also how it was imagined, communicated, and ultimately circulated as an architectural image.
The transformation of Bankside will also be discussed through the Millennium Bridge, focusing on the negotiations and relationship between Herzog & de Meuron and Foster + Partners. The bridge is considered not merely as an infrastructural connection between Tate Modern and St Paul’s, but as part of the larger urban and cultural strategy that connected the museum to the city across the Thames.
Finally, the lecture turns to the Turbine Hall and its exhibition programme, examining how the enormous industrial interior became more than a circulation or exhibition space. Through a series of large-scale commissions and installations, the Turbine Hall has developed into a cultural stage in its own right, influencing both the identity of Tate Modern and the way contemporary art can occupy and transform architectural space.
Taken together, these episodes present Tate Modern as more than a single architectural project. They reveal a continuous process of negotiation between industrial heritage and contemporary culture, architecture and representation, building and infrastructure, institution and public, and permanent architecture and temporary artistic intervention. The lecture therefore approaches Tate Modern as an evolving urban and cultural project whose significance lies as much in the relationships it has generated as in the architecture itself.