A Powerful Planting of Culture

In a moment, contemporary art and architecture have arrived here, in a city that has long been uneasy with both. Housed in the former Bankside Power Station along the Thames River, the new Tate Gallery of Modern Art is London’s first contemporary art museum. But it is as architecture that the museum fulfills the 20th century desire to create an art of the masses. By seamlessly fusing the public realm and art, it accomplishes that feat with a force that few museum buildings have ever attained.

Built at a cost of about $210 million, in the Southwark district along the Thames, Tate Modern is the centerpiece of a broader redevelopment effort aimed at bringing culture to a formerly dilapidated section of south London. The Millennium Footbridge, designed by the celebrated British architect Norman Foster, will connect the site to the city’s financial center across the river to the north.

Designed by the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the building places art firmly in the arc of modern history. The design embraces both past and present without passing judgment on either. By weaving together the original brick structure and a more slippery aesthetic of transparent and translucent surfaces, it suggests a world of multiple realities. The feeling, as you walk through it, is of a culture that has finally settled comfortably into its own.

The original power plant was a colossal, melancholy building. Designed in 1947 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, best known for creating the once ubiquitous red London phone booths, the building loomed over the river, with a towering chimney rising from the center of a solid, rectangular mass of brick. Set directly across the Thames from the dome of Sir Christopher Wren’s famed St. Paul’s Cathedral, the chimney symbolically placed industry on an equal footing with the church.

Herzog and De Meuron chose to preserve that image, leaving the building’s exterior largely untouched. The first hint of its new function is a two-story, rooftop glass box--the “light beam”--running almost the full length of the building and housing a restaurant and the museum’s members lounge. Made of translucent glass pierced by long, narrow windows, the box’s soft surfaces and horizontal form help to break down the building’s muscular scale. During an overcast day, the light beam seems to melt away into the gray sky. At night, lit up from within, it becomes a glowing beacon for culture.

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Inside, the building is organized with the same blunt efficiency. The building is divided lengthwise into two parallel zones. Galleries, restaurant, cafe, bookstore and an education center are set at the front of the building, facing the river. In back, the Turbine Hall, which once housed the plant’s oil-fired engines, now serves as a massive public room. Two paths cut directly through the museum. From the river, to the north, one leads to a main lobby, and then extends across a bridge that spans the 115-foot-tall Turbine Hall, eventually leading to Sumner Street on the building’s south side. From the west, a broad ramp descends down to the Turbine Hall’s main floor, one story below ground level.

The intersection of these paths with the various public spaces gives the design the complexity of a Piet Mondrian grid painting, without sacrificing its functional clarity. In effect, the design is a three-dimensional composition of overlapping axes and spaces, drawing the surrounding street-scape right into the building. Visitors arriving from the Millennium Footbridge, for instance, can enter the museum and go see art, linger in the vast hall or, if they choose, pass right on through to the other side and walk home.

The Turbine Hall will instantly become one of the city’s most remarkable public rooms. Lined in painted brick, 500 feet long, the hall is conceived as a vast urban square. Along one side, the silhouettes of passing figures can be seen behind a wall of transparent and translucent glass, with views opening into the bookstore and the museum’s lower lobby. Up above, a series of horizontal, glass-sided rooms protrudes into the space, emitting an eerie glow. The subtle layering of activities and zones makes you acutely aware of the life that encircles you, a heightened version of the interplay of forces that define the urban experience. The hum of transformers--still in use--reinforces that aura of a vast social machine.

Overt pleasure in the materiality of things is a central theme of the design. The cafe, one of the building’s most sensual spaces, is set at a corner at ground level, overlooking a crushed gravel walkway, a green lawn and the river. Its floor-to-ceiling windows are broken up by a repetitive rhythm of heavy structural columns, encased in reflective glass boxes. The various glass surfaces fragment the views inside and out, suggesting an unstable world, layered with multiple meanings, open to interpretation.

All of this is meant to prepare you for the experience of viewing art. The goal is to open up the mind and make the senses more alert. Once you reach the galleries on the upper floors, via a series of long escalators, you encounter a sequence of seemingly conventional white rooms on three floors. But here, too, the subtle use of texture and natural light adds to the building’s power. Raw, unfinished oak floors, for instance, feel rough under the feet. Large clerestory windows illuminate some of the galleries, creating a radiant environment.

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The sequence through the galleries is occasionally interrupted by small reading rooms, urging you to temporarily draw back and think about what it is you are looking at. A few carefully framed views open up to the river. Above the galleries, the rooftop restaurant allows you to escape the art entirely, and gaze out at a spectacular view of the city. But these spaces are conceived as incidental moments, pauses in the narrative. Rather than distract the viewer, the effect of such a nuanced treatment of space is to draw you deeper into the collections.

Surprisingly, few museums have demonstrated this ability to make art a public experience without sacrificing the importance of the art itself. Buildings like Paris’ Pompidou Center, completed in 1977, may have created the feel of a spontaneous street festival, but its cavernous central hall and machine aesthetic make it a terrible place to view art.

A more successful model from a populist standpoint is Los Angeles’ Geffen Contemporary. Designed by Frank O. Gehry in 1984, the museum is housed in a raw warehouse space stripped down to its bare essentials, with an elevated entry that allows you to survey the scope of the exhibitions before descending into the various galleries. Its power stems from the fact that the barrier that once separated high art from the public is totally stripped away. You feel closer to the process of making art than to the process of categorizing, valuing and promoting it.

The Tate pushes that model even further. The melding of art and industry--a central theme of 20th century culture--is wonderfully resolved here. With its simple forms, seductive surfaces and moments of ephemerality, the structure accepts the highs and lows of 20th century history as simple realities. It is not a sentimental reworking of the past. Nor does it aspire to replace it with a Utopian dream. Like much great art, it seeks to represent elusive, multiple truths.