London's Tate Modern museum has a shiny, brand-new extension, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning duo behind the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, and it is a looker. Though the building—dubbed the "Switch House" in a nod to the former electrical substation around which the new structure was erected—is closed to the public until Friday, June 17, the museum has released illuminating shots taken by jetsetting architectural photographer Iwan Baan.
Unlike so much of the (rectangular) museum design we've seen of late, the photos reveal a 10-story brick building with a form like a torquing pyramid. Inside the 226,000-square-foot space, galleries do fall in line with the current vogue of column-free exhibition spaces and rugged concrete walls and floors, but the similarities seem to end there: Like Zaha Hadid's MAXXI museum in Rome, which opened in 2010, stairways and ceilings swoop and curve, freeing themselves of the constraints of the 90-degree angle.
The new structure's masonry facade is a nod to "the brick chimney at the front of the museum," Curbed wrote in September when an official opening date for the Switch House was announced. The extension will increase the Tate's visitor capacity by 60 percent. Take a look around and watch a timelapse video of the building's construction below.
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