Editorial Note · 04 / 12

An oil power station
reborn as a public room —
monumental, raw, civic.

Bankside Power Station — built in two phases by Giles Gilbert Scott — was decommissioned in 1981 and converted by Herzog & de Meuron in 2000 into what is now the most-visited modern art museum in the world. The 2016 Switch House extension carved a folded brick prism around the former oil tanks, extending the Turbine Hall's civic logic vertically across ten storeys.

Iwan Baan's editorial documentation places the building back inside its city: the river, the Millennium Bridge, the cranes of Vauxhall to the south. The archive selects images that resist the museum's heroic register and frame Tate Modern instead as a continuation of London's industrial floor.