The Turbine Hall

Look at the fabric of the building. The brick walls and the black steel columns belong to Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect who also designed the red telephone box and Battersea Power Station, and who built Bankside in two phases between nineteen forty seven and nineteen sixty three. The Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron kept his shell almost intact, sliced away the floor so that the hall drops below ground level, and added the bridge across the middle and the glowing light box on the roof. The result is a room that feels industrial and sacred at the same time.

The power station closed in nineteen eighty one and Tate Modern opened in May two thousand, becoming the most visited modern art museum in the world within a few years. The Turbine Hall commissions began with Louise Bourgeois's towers and giant spider and have since included Olafur Eliasson's artificial sun, Carsten Holler's slides, Ai Weiwei's porcelain sunflower seeds and Doris Salcedo's crack in the floor. Even when nothing is installed, stand on the bridge and watch people spread across the floor below: the hall turns visitors into part of the work.

Did You Know? When Doris Salcedo cracked the floor of the hall in two thousand and seven, the fissure was later filled in, and its faint line can still be traced in the concrete.