Cinematic sensation or video nasty? Herzog and De Meuron's proposed extension to Tate Modern, viewed from the Thames
Designs by Swiss architects Herzog and De Meuron for a cinematic extension to Tate Modern, Europe's most visited art gallery, were unveiled yesterday. They reveal a flamboyant, highly theatrical and immensely complex 11-storey glass tower in the form of a spiralling stepped pyramid, or ziggurat, destined to rise from the south-west corner of the existing gallery, formerly Bankside Power Station.
It will house 10 new galleries, six new cafes and bars, a public viewing platform, all sorts of education rooms and studios, and offers a chance for the Tate to put on exhibitions of pretty much anything it can think of that qualifies as art, as well as to show off some of its largely unseen permanent collections.
In my view the proposed £212m extension is a truly radical design, a building every bit as vivacious as the existing Tate Modern is stately and sombre.
Some, of course, will disagree and find it all too much - and just as there were vocal critics of the Victoria & Albert Museum's attempt to build the Daniel Libeskind and Cecil Balmond-designed Spiral gallery at South Kensington in the late 1990s, so there will be those who want what's left of un-regenerated Southwark to remain Dickensian rather than Space Age.
But what do you Culture Vultures think? Is the Tate heading in the right direction with this sensational new structure, or is it just a pickled-shark-style gimmick? What kind of message does it send?
