On the museum that changed what a public building could do — and what it looks like without a crowd
The Turbine Hall is not, primarily, a gallery. It is a room — one of the largest interior public spaces in the world — and the art that arrives here is always in conversation with that room first.
The Turbine Hall is not, primarily, a gallery. It is a room — one of the largest interior public spaces in the world, conceived by Giles Gilbert Scott as a generating station for the south bank of the Thames and converted by Herzog & de Meuron into something for which no adequate category previously existed. The art that arrives here is always in conversation with that room first, and with everything else second.
On a weekday morning before eleven, the Turbine Hall operates at a scale that becomes legible. You can see from one end to the other. You can understand the ramp, the bridge levels at each floor, the way the original industrial structure was retained as a fact rather than aestheticised as a reference. The building knows what it was. The art knows where it is.
The permanent collection across the upper galleries is better than most visitors allow themselves time to understand. The twentieth century in all of its extraordinary difficulty is present here with the specificity that only a collection of this depth can achieve. Rothko's Seagram Murals occupy a dedicated room; the light is carefully managed; the bench in the centre of it is placed correctly. You cannot replicate the Seagram Murals in reproduction. The room does something that the image cannot do.
The Bankside location has its own quality. The walk from the Globe Theatre along the river to the Millennium Bridge, and across to St Paul's, is one of the great short walks in London — two institutions separated by a river and a century and a half, now looking at each other across water. The walk back along the south bank, past the booksellers under Waterloo Bridge, is a different kind of satisfaction.
Come on a Tuesday. Come before the school groups arrive. The Turbine Hall in the morning with almost no one in it is a genuinely large experience — architectural, spatial, the kind of encounter with a building that cities occasionally make available to those who choose the right hour.