Tate Modern Turbine Hall
1 June – 29 August 2005
To coincide with the fifth anniversary of the opening of Tate Modern, Tate will present Herzog & de Meuron: An Exhibition. The exhibition offers a unique insight into the creative processes of one of the world’s leading architectural practices. Herzog & de Meuron won the international competition to select an architect for Tate Modern on 24 January 1995 and has recently been appointed to develop a further scheme for completion of the gallery and its surrounding area.
The exhibition, which is the first major architecture show to be presented by Tate, spans twenty-five years of work from early residential projects to recent large-scale international commissions, including Tate Modern. Arranged over forty ‘island’ tables of various sizes in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, more than seventy projects will be represented by objects from the Herzog & de Meuron archive that reveal the diverse, creative paths of development which lead to the realisation of these projects. Made from a wide variety of materials, the objects range from sketches, early maquettes outlining ideas and material samples to models and mock-ups as well as photographs and film footage of finished projects. These items tell the story of how ideas take shape and form through a complex process of experimentation and detour to evolve a new architectural language for building. They will spread out as if in a market square, reminding us of the architects’ original concept of the Turbine Hall as a public street.
Herzog & de Meuron was founded in Basel in 1980 by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and, since then, it has completed many landmark projects. The practice now has additional offices in London, Munich, Barcelona, San Francisco and Beijing. It has received international acclaim for its innovative work including, in 2001, The Pritzker Prize and, in 2003, the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize for The Laban Dance Centre, London.
Projects featured in the exhibition will include the Dominus Winery, Napa Valley, California 1998, Schaulager for the Laurenz Foundation in Basel in 2003, Prada’s flagship store in Aoyama, Tokyo 2003, the library of Eberswalde University, Germany 1999, Forum Barcelona 2004, the expansion of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis 2005 and ongoing projects such as the de Young Museum, San Francisco opening in 2005, the Allianz Arena, the new Soccer Stadium for Munich (to be completed in May 2005, opening game FIFA World Cup 2006), The National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and The Philharmonic Hall, Hamburg, which will be completed in 2009.
This exhibition, Herzog & de Meuron’s 250th project, was originally presented as Herzog & de Meuron No.250. An Exhibition at Schaulager Basel in 2004 and was produced as a collaboration between Schaulager and the architects.