Glass box 'pile' planned for Tate Modern

Tate officials have complained of overcrowding. Picture / Reuters

LONDON - London's Tate Modern, the world's most popular modern art museum, unveiled plans overnight to build a giant glass pyramid-style extension which its creator described as a "pile" of boxes.

Unlike the uniform glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre museum in Paris, the planned extension to the converted power station on the southern bank of the Thames is asymmetric.

The new building, which aims to ease visitor congestion, should be ready in time for the Olympic Games in London in 2012 and will cost around 165 million pounds to complete at current prices.

"We're doing it in the first place because the Tate Modern was originally designed to receive 1.8 million visitors a year," said Nicholas Serota, Tate director.

"It now receives four million a year," he told reporters at the official unveiling of the new project.

In comparison, the Museum of Modern Art in New York receives 2.7 million and the Pompidou Centre in Paris 2.5 million each year, according to figures provided by the Tate.

Despite the vast scale of the current building, which was converted from the Bankside Power Station by Swiss-based architects Herzog & de Meuron to international critical acclaim, Tate officials complain of overcrowding.

Vicente Todoli, director of Tate Modern, described the museum sometimes as "people looking at people looking at other people looking at art".

The same design team has been chosen for the new project, which consists of 10 storeys above ground and rises above the level of the existing building, causing concern among designers worried it may spoil the view of the Tate from the north.

Herzog & de Meuron have designed the stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, as well as the Philharmonic Hall in Hamburg due to open in 2009.

The Tate extension will be attached to the south of the museum and provide space for new galleries, performance and educational programmes.

The architects said one reason for choosing an asymmetric design was to distinguish the new building from the more straight-lined corporate structures in the area.

- REUTERS