New Tate Gallery Set for London

London’s venerable Tate Gallery is moving ahead with ambitious plans to transform Bankside Power Station, a massive brick building with cathedral windows on the south bank of the River Thames, into a new Tate Gallery of Modern Art. The 120,000-square-foot facility is slated to open in the year 2000, more than doubling the Tate’s present exhibition space.

In a major reorganization of its collections, the Tate plans to devote its existing building to British art from the 16th Century to the present. About a mile and a half to the northeast--opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral and the central district known as the City of London--the new gallery will display international modern art.

The latest step in the Tate’s expansion effort is an announcement of six architects chosen as finalists in an international competition to design the new gallery. Those selected are David Chipperfield (Britain), Herzog & de Meuron (Switzerland), Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Netherlands), Rafael Moneo (Spain), Renzo Piano Building Workshop (Italy) and Tadao Ando Architect & Associates (Japan). The winning architect will be announced in February. Tate Gallery Director Nicholas Serota, Austrian architect Hans Hollein and Richard Koshalek, director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, are among the members of a 10-person committee that will select the architect.

Bankside Power Station was designed in 1947 by Mott, Hay and Anderson Engineers and built in two phases between 1948 and 1963. The obvious challenge facing the Tate architect is to convert a power station into a museum for the 21st Century.

But the architect is also expected to think in terms of the building’s metropolitan context. Promoted as “one of the most important public buildings to be realized in Britain in the last quarter of the 20th Century,” the new gallery and its spectacular 8.5-acre site will be a key element in London’s development over the next two decades and in the regeneration of the London borough of Southwark. Plans call for constructing a bridge to link the Tate Gallery of Modern Art with St. Paul’s Cathedral and a pier that will allow visitors to travel between the two Tates by river.