Qualla: Tate Modern

Tate Modern: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Reeve, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a winter afternoon in 2003, two million Londoners lay on the floor of a power station looking up at an artificial sun. Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with mist and amber light and a vast semi-circle of monofrequency lamps overhead, doubled by a mirrored ceiling into a full disc. Visitors made shapes with their bodies on the concrete floor below, looking up at themselves reflected in the mirror as tiny silhouettes against the sun. The work ran for six months. More than two million people came. Nobody who experienced it has forgotten. That is the genius of Tate Modern - the building gives artists a 3,400-square-metre cathedral of concrete and steel to fill with their dreams, and the public arrives by the millions to lie down inside them.

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Image: Michael Reeve | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tate Modern: From Power Station to Picasso

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Bankside Power Station was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott - the same architect who gave London its red telephone boxes and the brick fortress of Battersea Power Station across the river. Bankside was built in two stages between 1947 and 1963, a 200-metre brick fortress direc...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tate Modern: The Turbine Hall

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit dconvertini, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk through the western doors and the floor drops away. Herzog and de Meuron preserved the immense rectangular cavity where the power station's generators once spun - five storeys tall, 155 metres long, 3,400 square metres of empty volume. The original overhead travelling crane ...

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Image: dconvertini | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tate Modern: The Brick Pyramid

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jim Linwood from London, CC BY 2.0. By 2010 the gallery was attracting nearly twice the visitors Herzog and de Meuron had designed for, and the trustees commissioned the same architects to design an extension. Three enormous circular oil storage tanks beneath the south end of the building had been left unused. The ...

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Image: Jim Linwood from London | CC BY 2.0

Tate Modern: The Collection

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Claude Monet, Public domain. Tate Modern holds the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art - everything made from 1900 onwards. The Boiler House shows the broader sweep; the Blavatnik Building focuses on art from 1960 to today. The collection arranges itself thematic...

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Image: Claude Monet | Public domain

Tate Modern: The Crowds and the Cost

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jordiferrer, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 2022, Tate Modern was again drawing 3.9 million visitors a year, the fourth-most-visited art museum in the world. Entry to the permanent collection remains free, in line with the principle that has held for all British national museums since the 19th century. The temporary exh...

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Image: Jordiferrer | CC BY-SA 4.0