4. Describe the way the windmill work. Text 7. Tate and Clore

The Tate Gallery is the National Gallery of British Art. It is named after Sir

Henry Tate (1819 – 99), a rich merchant. His gallery contained one of the best private collections of modern art in England. To house it he founded the National Gallery and was created a baronet in the year after the Tate Gallery had been opened. … [1]

It was erected in a free classic style. In the centre of the facade is a handsome projecting Corinthian portico.

The Clore building is an extension to the Tate Gallery, built by James Stirling and Michael Wilford. The Clore Gallery is a kind of surrealist collage of the recent past and history. … [2]

The Clore building consists of two arms, one joining the Tate Gallery just behind one of its lateral pavilions, the other turning at right angles from this towards the river and coming within a few yards of another existing building, the ‘Lodge’, formerly part of the military hospital but now a permanent part of the Tate Complex. The first and longest of these arms contains the nine Turner galleries on the main floor, with the auditorium, education department and usual offices below. … [3] In the angle between the two wings is a landscaped garden.

Sidney Smith’s Tate building of 1897 stands on a basement of rock-faced rus-

tics. Smith has two orders: the Corinthian of the portico and a secondary order which is Ionic but suddenly turns Doric. Stirling has taken Smith's Ionic/Doric cornice and ran it continuously with a blocking course along both arms of his new building. More by chance, than by design, the Gibbsinian cornice of the red-brick Neo-Georgian Lodge strikes exactly the level of Smith’s. Between the old Tate and the Lodge, noth­ing rises higher than the blocking course, except a brief attic storey at the Lodge, containing the curator’s office.

In front of the public entrance to the Clore there is a stone-flagged terrace with a pool of water and a pergola. … [4]

The Tate is pedimented and windowed only in its rocky base. The Clore entrance wall is of Portland ashlar. The entrance opening has the shape of a low, gabled (or pedimented) building, above it there a lunette, there are no windows. The bright green metal grid fills the opening and clasps the revolving door.

The solution of the adjacent elevations is also very interesting. Picture galleries, like prisons and mausoleum, do not ask to be windowed. The Classical masters played Classical games on blind walls: Soane’s game with the Tivoli Order at the Bank, Sidney Smith solved the problem simply by blocking up Venetian windows. Stirling has found his own answer in a different mode – system of ‘gridding’. A grid of Portland stone ribs wraps the whole building. … [5] It has nothing to do with the structure (it is a reinforced concrete frame, unseen). In the gallery block all the panels are filled with buff stucco, in the other block partly by red brick to match the Lodge.

There are nine rooms in all. First a big room, then a long ‘spinal’ room, four smaller rooms lead off this and on one of them is a Stirlingesque version of what the Elizabethans called a carrel window, i.e. a bay projecting into a peaked oriel, its metal bars, painted green, appear in the centre bay of the outside elevation. Another big room connects with the old Tate. A separate room, adjoining the first big room, darker and differently decorated, is reserved for watercolors. … [6] That officer can look over a balustrade into the room, or outside to the terrace (through a small peaked oriel) or inwards to the staircase hall (through an open triangle) with scarcely a movement from his or her desk.

The lighting combines natural and artificial light and adjusts itself automatically to the conditions of the external world.