ARTS
Museums
The road for the Tate
Laurence Marks contemplates a conversion for the millennium
In the Piranesi-like half-light of a December afternoon, the rusted turbines, boilers and supporting columns of the old Bankside power station look like aban- doned monuments of a lost civilisation. Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, first set eyes on them 18 months ago and, like Gibbon amid the ruins of the Capitol, was moved to contemplate his masterpiece. He would transform the building into a Tate Gallery of Modern Art that would match, if not excel, the Pompi- dou Centre, New York's MOMA, the Kroller-Muller in Holland and all the other great white spaces around the world that shame the Tate's rather poky accommoda- tion on Millbank. What it needed was a good architect and about £80 million. A competition (the winner will be announced in February) would yield the one and the Millennium Commission (bidding opens on Wednesday) half the other, leaving the rest of the money to be raised by the Tate.
The case for a new museum is unanswer- able. There is presently room to display only 1,000 of the 4,500 paintings and sculp- tures in London and another 225 in Liver- pool and St Ives. The hang is changed by annual rotations, sometimes with an inter- estingly didactic theme. But one doesn't go to a gallery primarily for a lesson in art his- tory. It's annoying to turn up and find that your favourites have been removed into storage. By dividing the Tate's two collec- tions — British on Millbank and Modern on Bankside — Serota will more than dou- ble space for both permanent display and temporary exhibitions.
There will be problems of definition: will an international master like Francis Bacon hang in the British or Modern Gallery? But then there always are. In Paris the joins between the Louvre and the Orsay, and the Orsay and the Pompidou, are sometimes pretty ragged.
The Tate needs a new museum, then, but does it need to preserve Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's steel framed, brick-clad shed on the eight-and-a-half-acre site it is buying from Nuclear Electric? The building possesses little architectural distinction (Whitehall resisted English Heritage's attempt to have it listed) and no noticeable hold on the affections of the inhabitants of Southwark. `Destroy it! I hate it,' the borough's plan- ning chief, Fred Manson, told Will Alsop, one of the British architects eliminated at an earlier stage of the competition.
The attractions of the site are its promi- nence on the south bank of the Thames, bang opposite St Paul's, and its downtown accessibility. This will improve when four municipalities — the cities of London and Westminster and the boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth — have complet- ed their Cross River Strategy to upgrade pedestrian and riverboat links between the two sides of the Thames.
That prominence is an argument for demolition. Visitors who are taken up to the roof of the power station are apt to remark on the splendour of the view across the river to St Paul's and the topless towers of London Wall. Actually, the view is calamitous. The cathedral is surrounded and partly masked by a spectacularly grace- less agglomeration of lifeless office blocks. With a few exceptions like Richard Rogers's Lloyds headquarters and Terry Farrell's Alban Gate, there are no conspicuous examples of corporate architecture of the first rank. An adventurous new building on Bankside might provide a model for uncon- fident boards of directors to emulate. `Most architects would agree that it would be better to have a new building,' says Alsop. Serota dissents. First on the grounds of cost. He inspected half a dozen possible sites including King's Cross, Greenwich, Smithfield, Vauxhall and the South Bank at Waterloo. He says that, while converting The plot thickens' Bankside is marginally cheaper than build- ing on the two latter sites, rebuilding on Bankside (leaving the electricity substation, which is still in use) would be significantly dearer. But the argument is complicated by the fact that only part of the power station will be adapted in the first phase that will open in the year 2000. The rest will wait upon future needs. By commissioning a somewhat smaller Gallery and adding to it later, the Tate might well afford a new building. It's impossible to tell without see- ing the figures.
Secondly, Serota argues, artists prefer conversions to new architecture. Last Jan- uary he sent a questionnaire to 80 estab- lished artists around the world. There was a consensus in favour of rural rather than urban museums, 19th-century Beaux Arts or converted industrial buildings rather than contemporary ones, and solid walls rather than flexible partitioned space. This looks like a thumping vote of no confi- dence in new architecture but may be, less damningly, merely a beef about the interior spaces preferred by museum curators.
If the latter, it is hardly relevant to the Bankside Tate. Little of the building's industrial character is likely to survive the conversion. Serota has told architects that he wants a bold transformation, not a rev- erential restoration. The contours, inside and out, are not sacred. One or two of the six short-listed architects propose to change them drastically, and the competi- tion brief proposes to create six self-con- tained suites of rooms, five for permanent display, one for exhibitions. In any case, Serota is Europe's most experienced impresario of gallery spaces: the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (in the 1970s), the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1980s), the St Ives Tate (two years ago). They all have the self-effacing Bauhausische pallor and clarity that artists appear to love.
The reason he is going for a conversion instead of a new building is not principle but bureaucratic pragmatism. With a site so close to St Paul's, John Gummer, the Environment Secretary, would almost cer- tainly call in any application to demolish. That would probably mean a time-consum- ing public inquiry. 'It would get Nick Sero- ta into a public debate about style,' says David Chipperfield, one of the short-listed architects. 'It would be a replay of the row over the National Gallery extension. The advantage of conversion is that it gives the Tate the big space it wants while by-passing the whole "carbuncle" business.'
It would be absurdly puritanical to con- demn, for this reason, an enterprise that will add to the pleasures of life. It should also help to regenerate a neighbourhood (present unemployment rate 26 per cent) that has been stricken by the collapse of the economy of east and south London. It's a rum business, all the same. At a time when everyone wants the Millenium Com- mission to reward originality and the breaking of traditionalist constraints and imaginative adventurousness, the Tate Gallery, under the direction of the most influential standard-bearer of avant-garde taste in the land, will be hiding like a her- mit crab beneath a borrowed carapace. Some millennium!
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