Frances Morris, Michael Craig-Martin, Andrew Marr and Sheena Wagstaff. Tate Modern: The Handbook

In 1992, the decision was made to split the Tate collection and form the Gallery of Modern Art. “As the Tate was always short of space, and never able to show more than 20 per cent of its collection at any one time, the case to build a new, separate Tate gallery of modern art became more compelling.”3 The quest to build a new Gallery had begun, starting with the most crucial element, finding a site. Multiple cities around the world have shown in the last thirty years how a new public building can rejuvenate an entire city or an area within it, key examples of this would be, the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum by Frank Gehry or V&A Dundee by Kengo Kuma.

A similar thought process was in place with the selection of Giles Gilbert Scott’s redundant Bankside Power Station. “The area around Tate Modern was originally a zone of pleasure and luxury, then squalor and wildness.”4 After the Second World War the area of Southwark was almost bypassed when London was expanding along an East/West axis. The building was relatively unknown to most who passed it unlike its sister, the Battersea Power Station, designed by the same architect. “Now after periods of neglect or lack of cohesion, post-industrial Southwark is a role model for new British urbanism”5

There were around one hundred and fifty entrants to the initial competition, with thirteen of them being asked to produce an initial design and from this only six would proceed to a more detailed round. What made this competition even more interesting was that only one of the six finalists were British, sparking some controversy within the media. ‘It was a tricky brief, as Michael Craig-Martin, then a Tate trustee and on the competition panel, recalls “Bankside Power Station wasn’t really a building; it was a shoebox. It was four exterior walls with a big machine in it, and when you took out the big machine all you had was a giant empty box.”’ 6

01. Guggenheim, Bilbao. Architect: Frank Gehry 02. V&A, Dundee. Architect: Kengo Kuma

3 Rowan Moore and Raymund Ryan. Building Tate Modern: Herzog & de Meuron transforming Giles Gilbert Scott. (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 15. 4 Frances Morris, Michael Craig-Martin, Andrew Marr and Sheena Wagstaff. Tate Modern: The Handbook. (London: Tate Gallery, 2006), 15. 5 Rowan Moore and Raymund Ryan. Building Tate Modern: Herzog & de Meuron transforming Giles Gilbert Scott. (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 14. 6 “The ones that got away: Tates rejected designs,” The Art Newspaper, Jun 2, 2014.