Tate Modern

Tate Modern is an art museum on the south bank of the River Thames in London, housed in the former Bankside Power Station, a brick building designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and built in two stages between 1947 and 1963. After the power station closed in 1981, the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron converted the building into a museum, keeping its exterior brickwork and turning its central turbine hall into a vast open exhibition space, and the museum opened in 2000. The conversion is widely cited as a landmark of adaptive reuse, turning a redundant industrial structure into one of the most visited modern art museums in the world without erasing its industrial character. A later extension, the Blavatnik Building, was added by the same architects to the south of the original structure.