If ever there was a museum age in Europe and America, it happened in the last half of the 20th century as city after city, nation after nation, set out in pursuit of glory through the accumulation and display of works of art--their own and other people's. One might almost compare it to the sustained religious outpouring, construction as crusading, that covered medieval Europe with its "white mantle" of churches so many centuries ago.
In May a building opened to the London public that may be said to have written a dramatic coda to this narrative of building. It is one of the largest museums ever dedicated to 20th century art, possibly the best in terms of planning and general "feel."
It is not a glass Parthenon, like Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin, or an elaborately "timeless" spatial event, like Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is not an operatic signature building, like Frank Gehry's titanium-sheathed meganautilus in Bilbao, Spain. Still less is it a feat of conspicuously externalized luxury, like Richard Meier's Getty Center, poised in marble aloofness above Los Angeles.
It takes advantage of a site that no one seems to have noticed before: the end of a great imagined axis across the Thames, with Wren's dome of St. Paul's at the opposite end. It is not an effort of heroic originality. It doesn't strut or blow or, like I.M. Pei's Louvre entrance, invoke the Pyramids of Egypt. It is not a rerun of noble history but an adaptation, a conversion job, of something very large but day-to-day.
Welcome to Tate Modern, once a power station built above the bomb wreckage of the blitz by a half-forgotten architect named Giles Gilbert Scott, now rebuilt by the Swiss-based firm of Herzog & De Meuron as London's first museum of modern art.
No proper-thinking modernist architect in the mid-1950s would have given London's Bankside Power Station much chance of making it into the canon of modern architecture. An enormous, darkly lowering hulk of brick, it dominated the south bank of the Thames like a factory, which in fact it was. But more valuable buildings have been lost to economic boom and proactive aesthetics than were ever ruined by decay and indifference. Nobody tore down the Bankside Power Station because none could agree on a use for its site. It just lay there, an unloved, comatose and grimy princess, waiting for someone to kiss it.
Fortunately for it, and for all central London, that person was the director of the Tate Gallery, Sir Nicholas Serota.
The Tate had long had its own problems. It was overstuffed: not enough walls to show the art on, not enough basement to store the submerged nine-tenths of the iceberg in. It was also, to no small degree, schizophrenic: beyond comparison, the greatest historical collection of British art that ever has been or will be assembled, but encased in a jacket of international-modernist works, the two pushing and puffing for wall space in a great city that, unlike New York, Paris, Berlin or almost any other major Western city, still had no "dedicated" museum of modern art. This was a huge Gordian knot in British culture, and Serota--a low-key man of striking tenacity, intelligence and charm--put Alexander's sword to it.