On Sunday, with half an hour to spare before my timed entry to the Georgia O’Keefe exhibition, I ventured to Tate Modern’s 10th-floor viewing platform (Get some net curtains, says Tate director in row over flats and a not so private view, 22 September).
The view from there is fine if you want to look at modern office blocks such as the Shard and the Gherkin, but if you want to spot Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament you have to twist your body, bend low and put your head on one side, as the view is blocked by the tops of nearby buildings. The Tower of London is mostly hidden too.
No wonder, then, that we voyeurs stare into the flats nearby which, with their perfect, trendy furniture few of us can afford, offer an insight into how the other half lives. They have become exhibits. Sir Nicholas Serota’s notion that these people should put up net curtains is as naff and as likely as him installing JH Lynch’s Tina, or other popular prints from Woolworths’ heyday, in Tate Modern. He seems to think that people living in an urban centre should become suburban. The flat-dweller who had put giant cardboard cut-outs of people in their underwear in his windows had found a compromise; so should Sir Nicholas, perhaps by restricting viewing hours or shutting a platform that adds little to London anyway.
Catherine Pepinster
London
• It will seem clear to many readers that the viewing platform of the new 10th-floor viewing gallery at Tate Modern is the museum’s principal site for a work of performance art enacted by visitors and the occupants of adjacent luxury flats. The work not only challenges conventional notions of authorship but also raises important questions about surveillance and audience participation.
Peter and Roberta Smith
London
• I read your article about the Tate Modern viewing gallery overlooking its neighbours with interest and mounting incredulity. As soon as the scaffolding came down on the building and reviews were published, as an architect I immediately wondered how they had got away with it. How did the planners allow a public viewing gallery at this level on a building so close to pre-existing domestic buildings? In so many cases, in normal housing situations, any small development or extension is subject to a great deal of planning scrutiny and often obscured glass is a requirement or balconies are not allowed. Had the Tate building been 10 storeys higher so that the gallery was genuinely giving panoramic London views over the top of the Neo and neighbouring buildings, that might have been different, but as it stands it should be the Tate that puts up the net curtains. The gallery should be blanked off with obscured glass screens, or similar, on the sides directly facing the Neo building.
Anthony Tugwell
London
• Regarding Tate Modern voyeurism, surely it is the local planners’ responsibility to prevent the overlooking of domestic buildings? When I wanted to put a window in the side of a house which would look on to the neighbour’s garden the planners insisted that it be glazed with obscured glass. There’s the answer: frosted glass. Then we would not be able to spy on all those wealth exhibitionists.
Louis Hellman
London
• My daughter lives in a flat in Seven Sisters which is definitely not overlooked and she’d be really happy to do a straight swap with one of those “poor” unfortunates living under the daily gaze of people visiting Switch House. She told me she’d even throw in her de-humidifier.
Gary Bennett
Exeter
• Since some of the interiors look like Hockney prints, it’s hardly surprising that Tate visitors enjoy viewing them. But it’s not just the privacy of these shy occupiers that is at issue. What about those who are less shy and are happy to walk around with no clothes on or go to more extreme lengths to entertain these inquisitive viewers? How would Sir Nicholas respond to that behaviour? After all, it could constitute interesting performance art.
Andrew Hillier QC
London
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