By ALAIN DE BOTTON | May 9, 2010

Simple grace

A tight budget meant working with the swaths of industrial concrete that covered the former power plant’s surfaces – which ended up giving the museum an unpretentious bare dignity.

IF one had to pick a single building that could convince a despairing British citizen of his country’s many remaining virtues and of its plentiful possibilities for the future, it would have to be Tate Modern in London.

This is a building that has earned itself an importance in the British psyche that extends far beyond its size or its collection of international modern art (defined as art since 1900).

The building as a whole, from its signage to its toilets, its recessed strip-lights to its restaurants, has become an advertisement for what Britain should be like. Much as the Houses of Parliament or Buckingham Palace once reflected back to previous generations the values that they hoped their nation would embody, so the Tate now throws back to Britons an idealised vision of their country.

The English don’t so much like Tate Modern as hope to be like it: with its relaxed seriousness, its unstudied cool, its classlessness, its intelligence and its sense of play. It is a building that invites Britons to mould themselves in its image, it is the most seductive role model the country has.

For too long, British architecture gave no workable guide as to how people should live on the islands that comprise the United Kingdom. The important buildings, the great and revered ones, were steeped in aristocratic or ecclesiastical auras that were wholly unrealistic in their implications. They suggested that the past was the only worthy realm, that we would have to dress in the clothes of yesteryear, that technology was bad and the future terrifying.

And when we looked at modern buildings, they were either squalid, like the post-WWII residential tower blocks, crassly commercial like the skyscrapers of London’s Canary Wharf or full of ill-advised humour like the colourful postmodern boxes of the 1980s.

In the middle of these unpleasant choices, Tate Modern was inaugurated. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s original Bankside Power Station (built in the 1950s) was re-imagined by Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron Architekten, ending up as a building that succeeds in perfectly reconciling opposing elements like tradition and modernity, elitism and democracy, technology and nature.

Taken as a whole, Tate Modern’s site comprises an austerely beautiful promise of a dignified and graceful life. The birch trees and benches in front speak of an egalitarian sense of community, imbued with a Scandinavian or Swiss dignity. Being like “everyone else” no longer seems a shameful or dispiriting possibility in the grounds of Tate Modern – this is a place where the pauper and the prince can happily share sandwiches and bask in a common notion of Britishness.

Tate Modern was built on an extremely tight budget, but the genius of the Swiss architects turned this limitation into a virtue. The language is simple without ever seeming mean. The untreated oak floors irregularly hammered down with nails, the rough-and-ready strip-lamps, the swaths of industrial concrete surfaces end up having the unpretentious bare dignity one finds in certain hillside chapels or utilitarian medieval barns.

The museum proposes a new vision of the “United Kingdom” as a country that is reconciled with technology, that is no longer painfully in thrall to the past, that is democratic, tolerant, intelligent, playful and without spite or irony.

Of course, all this can’t help but be a simplification: a few miles to the east and south, there are expensive condominiums and run-down estates that immediately contravene any of the suggestions encoded in the Tate’s walls and ceilings.

Nevertheless, like renowned Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament in Colombo or Jorn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney, Australia, the Tate Modern is applying the prerogative of all ambitious architecture to create an identity rather than merely to reflect it, to use the hour or so when visitors are in its domain – objectively to check out the art and buy a few postcards – to propose an essay about the orientation of the country, defining what Britain might one day become rather than what it too often is.

The casual strip lighting and industrial feel of the Tate Modern’s celebrated Turbine Hall reflects the building’s utilitarian antecedents.

All works of design and architecture, from a Parliament to a fork or cup, talk to us about the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them.

They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people.

They speak of particular visions of happiness.

Hence, to describe Tate Modern as beautiful suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings.

A feeling that something is beautiful is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of our ideas of a good life.

Behind a practical facade, contemporary architecture should try to reflect back to its audience a selective image of who they might be, in the hope of improving upon, and moulding, reality.

The purpose of a building like the Tate is to evoke valuable states of mind which we theoretically approve of but forget in the run of daily life; such virtues as perspective, calm, reflection, kindness and courage. One comes away from the Tate with a sense that one had been returned, if only temporarily, to qualities central to our humanity.

It is a guilty secret that the art at Tate Modern is entirely secondary. Really, the place is a temple to itself, a celebration of architecture rather than, as advertised, art.

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Tate Modern is staging a free arts festival from Friday onwards, ‘No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents’ in its celebrated Turbine Hall, which is part gallery and part covered street. The museum is also asking the world for memories of Tate Modern over the last decade. These will be used in a film that will tell the public’s story about the gallery. People’s stories, pictures and film clips will be gathered via Tate’s online blog, the Tate Modern Flickr Group, Facebook, Twitter and on YouTube. For more informatiion, go to tate.org.uk/ modern. Alain de Botton is the author of ‘The Architecture of Happiness’, among other books. Some images for this article were provided by Visit Britain (visitbritain. com.my).

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