The iconic Tate Modern on London's Southbank underwent a £260m transformation, refurbishing unused areas of the Bankside power station, including the switch house and oil tanks beneath. A new 64m, eleven-storey brick-clad extension was also added.

After collaborating with the Tate and architects Herzog & de Meuron on the original building, Arup was engaged early to provide concept engineering services, successfully guiding the extension through the planning stages. Later, we were appointed to lead the lighting and fire engineering design for this engaging extension.

The new extension provides 60% more space for the Tate’s collection and includes a wide variety of learning, outreach and social spaces for visitors. This required a flexible design approach and a fundamental understanding of the principles of effective lighting and fire safety engineering to ensure that the architect’s vision could be realised.

Imaginative lighting

Our creative lighting strategy provided both daylight and electric lighting to enhance exhibitions and create a high-quality internal environment for visitors. It was designed to be flexible, adapting to various exhibitions, installations, educational and social spaces. We lit public areas to guide visitors and highlight the architecture, integrating seamlessly with existing lighting.

Externally, our design balanced the lighting of new public spaces around the museum with sensitivity to the Bankside neighborhood. Tate's vision for the new extension was to lead in sustainability, using 20% less energy than typical galleries. The building achieved a BREEAM 'Very Good' rating. Our lighting design contributed to this through low-energy fluorescent and LED lighting, including LED spotlights that use less than half the energy of traditional halogen spots, without compromising the quality of light in exhibition spaces. Ensuring the safety of visitors and staff, as well as protecting valuable artworks and the gallery's operations, was also key.

Total fire engineering

A sophisticated building like this requires a fire safety strategy to protect millions of visitors each year, as well as the irreplaceable artwork and installations. Our innovative Total Fire Engineering concept was integrated from the project's earliest stages, ensuring seamless fire safety from inception to completion.

The architectural centerpiece is the vertical boulevard, a unique central staircase connecting all floors, guiding visitors from the lowest galleries to the highest public bar. This design challenges conventional fire safety, which typically uses enclosed stairs to prevent fire and smoke spread.

Drawing on our experience and expertise, our team clearly understood how the Tate would use the eleven-storey space, the potential fire types, smoke and fire spread, and occupant movement to safety. Advanced computational modelling helped develop a tailored suite of active and passive fire safety systems, enabling Herzog & de Meuron’s vision and providing Tate with an effective and unique fire safety design.

Our involvement during construction was crucial to ensure the correct implementation of the fire safety strategy, considering the diverse materials and complex geometries created by the innovative architectural design.

Staircase inside the Tate Modern

The eleven storey-extension features the Vertical Boulevard, a unique central staircase penetrating all floors and required a sophisticated fire strategy

People inside the Tate Modern

Our lighting teams developed daylight and electric lighting schemes to enhance the artwork internally while minimising energy use

Partners & collaborators

AECOM / Herzog & de Meuron / Max Fordham LLP / Ramboll UK / Vogt Landscape Architects Mace