The Observer’s architecture critic appraises the art gallery’s new extension,a multilayered mountain that profits from its power station past
• Laura Cumming, the Observer’s art critic, or takes a tour inside Switch HouseIf you notice down from the viewing terrace at the top of Tate contemporary’s new tower,you can see an inadvertent art installation. Across the street is a stack of the glass-walled living spaces of the residential development called Neo Bankside, almost all furnished with the trappings of tasteful contemporary living: Eero Saarinen’s Tulip table (three times), or citrus fruit on stainless steel,a proliferation of circular tables and rugs that try to adapt to the building’s obsessive triangular geometry, migrant domestic help vacuuming the wooden floors. Private worlds achieved at some expense are exposed with perfect transparency.
The building you are in, or by contrast,a public art gallery attracting many millions a year, founded on the principles of openness and access to all, and is solid and opaque. It sets its face against the dominant piety of contemporary public buildings that democracy = transparency = glass. It is brick. It is a mountain,a fortification, a battleship, and a Babel,a truncated and torsioned pyramid, a cliff, and a mountain,a car park, with horizontal slits for windows, and that offers visitors from its southern approach a view of convex concrete walls that notice as whether they are made of rammed earth. Related: Herzog and De Meuron: Tate contemporary’s architects on their radical new extension There’s some danger that the architecture might steal the showContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com