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Tate Modern resolves viewing platform privacy dispute with Neo Bankside residents

2023-10-23T13:48:00-04:00

The Tate Modern in London has announced its compliance with the UK High Court’s February ruling regarding a privacy case that involved its 10th-floor viewing gallery and five residents of the adjacent Neo Bankside apartments.

The museum will now restrict visitors' access to the platform, which was constructed in 2016 as part of a Herzog & de Meuron-led $318 million Blavatnik Building expansion. The remedy will help the Tate avoid paying any monetary damages, as was the will of the plaintiffs. Their decision puts an end to a saga that has touched on Inner London’s class conflicts over housing and could potentially carry future ramifications in regards to design and the public realm, according to Guardian critic Oliver Wainwright and other observers.

Natasha Rees, a senior partner at the law firm Forsters, which represented the five Neo Bankside residents, said: “An award of damages was never our clients’ aim and they are grateful for the Tate’s recent willingness, instead, to agree t...

Herzog & de Meuron received reduced fee for Tate Modern extension

2017-08-15T14:37:00-04:00

Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss architecture firm behind the ambitious Tate Modern extension, took a reduced fee for work on the building project after costs went £45m over budget. According to documents obtained by the Architect’s Journal under the Freedom of Information act, Herzog & de Meuron was asked not to take its full fee for extra work on the 10-storey building, which went from costing £215m in 2012 to £260m in 2015.

The Art Newspaper cites the minutes from a 2015 Tate board of trustees meeting: "Conversation at a senior level indicates that [Herzog & de Meuron] will look sympathetically on this position, but that costs have already been incurred to a certain level, which will require some recompense, allowed for in the figures budgeted."

As published minutes reveal, some of the construction firms were also being named for unsatisfactory performance, notably window & facade contractors Seele and Loveld.

The genesis of Tate Modern

2016-06-21T12:06:00-04:00

When we first visited Bankside Power Station for the original Tate Modern competition in 1994, it seemed like the castle in Sleeping Beauty – an enormous urban mountain that was completely overgrown, surrounded by barbed wire and prickly roses, as if protecting the hidden beauty inside. It seemed dangerous. It is totally unimaginable now, but this was a huge chunk of the city that was totally excluded from public life, set back behind high walls.

A look around the new Tate Modern extension

2016-06-20T09:56:00-04:00

The original Tate Modern redevelopment was started in 1995 and since opening in 2000 has become the most popular gallery in the world. It made sense then for Herzog and De Meuron to return and finish the job. Their architectural evolution and legacy is now embedded in the London skyline, as is their success.

The synergy between the buildings, old and new, is remarkable and assisted satisfyingly by the graphic identity from British designer Peter Saville. The space is incredibly successful as an art gallery but also as an architectural performance; there are continuous structural accents inviting you to explore the sensuality of the space. From the inside the lattice brickwork is a welcome and original delight that insists on further inspection and accordingly reveals disguised benches bracketed into the window, ostensibly waiting for you all along. It is easy to navigate your way through the building but also extremely satisfying to get lost in it.

Offering almost certainly one of t...

First look inside Tate Modern's new Extension

2016-05-23T12:11:00-04:00

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.

Herzog and de Meuron in conversation with Rowan Moore

2016-05-17T14:36:00-04:00

As Herzog explains, piling some refined Swiss biscuits on the table in front of him to illustrate his point, an earlier design envisaged stacked-up glass cubes, but the material was too similar to the developers’ stuff. “We realised that in order to survive we have to strengthen it,” he says [..] Yet the precedent of the original Tate Modern – also severe on the outside, lively inside – shows that a building doesn’t have to gurn and wheedle to be popular.

"In this and other works, Herzog and De Meuron like to present a protestant moment of denial before pleasure, to forbid before welcoming, to be severe before generous. It is part of their worldview, different from most architects’, in which delight and beauty co-exist with more troubling or mysterious aspects of existence."

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