All About Architecture is a blog shows all aspects about architecture, including masters' building examples, structures, materials, environment control, building codes and management, or even some software skills.
TATE MODERN
UK, LONDON, 1994
conversion of a powerstation into a museum for modern art
The building offers space, but it is not suitable for art, it offers shelter, but it leaks and has to be repaired, it offers a location, but that is also problematic; it offers a beginning, a presence, which could be hard to organize working within contemporary parameters.
Hide
The British attitude towards the 'great' gesture, poised delicately between aversion and incompetence... The building, an object (abject) lesson in symmetry, will be the only museum in the world marooned on a mud bank, twice every 24 hours. It may need drastic strategies of dissociation; a Turneresque blur of brick from which strategies of dissociation will have to rescue / recuperate it.
The Tower, strangely invisible in spite of its height, can be partly dismantled, liberated from its substance / mass, as could other sections of the building. In the City, the skeletal will be more noticeable than bulk.
A strategy whereby new additions will influence the building seems doomed to be overly demonstrative; circulation-driven, high-tech spiderwebs, to be plausible.
Perhaps an entirely interior site. The grounds have a potential for development: the park now is almost more visible and susceptible for programmatic implantation...
Danger: 66,000 volts
It is significant that an institution about to enter an electric power station on the wrong site of a notoriously divisive river and needing an architect to help mastermind such a radical two-way transformation, to be financed so far with a virtual budget, is confidently casting on these still theoretical architects at the expense of a collection which as yet resembles, in its eccentricity and incompleteness, not so much a mosaic but an eccentric bubble diagram of the past century's artistic achievement.
One of those hated bubble diagrams that is supposedly the architect's lodestone... We would be tempted to treat the complex as a single site of which a large part is open-air, one indoors, one section occupied by a nasty tenant that emits noticeable vibrations at 100Hz. On the east side, demolitions could leave plausible entry conditions. It is also certain that architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers have contributed to this transformation. Therefore, involved but mistrusted for their contributions, the architects just substitute paintings for the word architecture, and a sense of how "incorrect" and brutal the line is. Maybe the best way would be to pretend it has one of Maleviches Architecton's invaded program...