Power into Art: the Making of Tate Modern Book

The millennium has been a godsend for doom-mongers nationwide. It seems there's nothing Brits like doing better than nodding sagely and muttering "I told you so" as some glamorous, innovative design project runs headlong into trouble, and 2000 has given us a few. First the Millennium Dome, then the London Eye--and now we get the sorry tale of the Tate Gallery's new gallery, designed for modern art, which someone thought would be best built inside the old Bankside power station in Southwark. Which was just asking for trouble. And trouble's what they got. Karl Sabbagh's book, more fascinatingly detailed than the Channel Four Series it accompanies, plots the painstaking progress of this ambitious and (from the pictures) stunning project, every step apparently a wrong one, from 1994 to publication (2000). For starters, the contract goes outside the country, to the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron--and the ensuing culture clash provides some great comedy moments, as when Sir Norman Foster meets Jacques Herzog and Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, and takes it on himself to "treat the director of one of the world's major art galleries and his architect to what appeared to be a lecture on the basic principles of architecture". But although the poor British workmen come in for a good deal of criticism, Sabbagh's book implies that most of the delays were due to greed on the part of contractors and--it must be said--the willingness of the project's executives to believe the outlandish claims made by those contractors. But somehow it got finished--almost. Sabbagh went to press as art was still being wheeled in so there's still time for any number of crises to pad out a second edition. I told you so. --Alan StewartRead More