Please don’t be quiet, new Tate Modern to tell art aficionados

IN DECADES gone by, a visit to a leading national art gallery would mean a meander around silent rooms to peer intently at the country’s finest works.

Those days, it appears, are a thing of the past as Tate Modern unveils plans to suit the modern era: a gallery built for socialising.

A £260m revamp of the London gallery will configure the majority of its space in order to encourage interaction, debate and discussion.

Sir Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, said visitors would be welcome to use its galleries as a “social and recreational space”.

“Art itself has changed,” he said. “We need to find a new way of showing the collection.”

The new Tate Modern, which is due to open in June next year, will unveil a completely rehung collection, with 60 per cent more display space. A new 10storey Switch House behind the main building will have views over London.

The building, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, will focus on cre- ating spaces for visitors to meet and talk, after 47 per cent of those they surveyed said they would like the gallery to have “space for encounters”.

The plans, which have run £30 million over budget, include extensive seating areas, open spaces and a room dedicated to debate and discussion.

Sir Nicholas said visitors had complained that its old galleries were too large to manage, so a series of smaller galleries will house part of the permanent collection in a traditional manner.

He said the new design would reflect the “increasingly sophisticated” public, balancing a focus on interaction with art and “some quiet moments too”.

Chris Dercon, director of Tate Modern, said the plans had been inspired in part after the 2003 Weather Project exhibition, featuring a rising sun in the Turbine Hall, showed a change in the way people wanted to take in art.

Speaking at the launch of Tate’s annual report yesterday, Sir Nicholas and Lord Browne, the chairman of Tate’s trustees, said that the galleries had received a record eight million visitors for their exhibitions in the past year, with 3.5 million of them under 35 years old.