In a mark of success, Tate plans to expand

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Tate Modern, which claims to be the most-visited modern art museum on earth, unveiled plans Tuesday for a striking new $397 million extension that is intended to be completed in time for the 2012 Olympics here.

Once the expansion has been realized, Tate Modern should be comparable in size to the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The annex, resembling glass boxes stacked arbitrarily to form a pyramid 220-feet high, or 67-meters, has been designed by the architects Herzog & de Meuron, the firm that in the late 1990s turned an abandoned power station opposite St. Paul's Cathedral into Tate Modern.

The extraordinary success of Tate Modern since its opening in 2000 explains the need for new space. "It was designed for 1.8 million people per year," said Nicholas Serota, who as director of the Tate also oversees Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives, "and now we have over 4 million visitors per year." The Tate said that figure compared with 2.5 million for the Pompidou and 2.7 million for MoMa.

The 11-floor annex, accessible through either a new plaza or Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall, will offer new galleries of different shapes and sizes to accommodate installations, videos, film, photography, performance and other art forms.

While the need for an extension was real, however, the opportunity to build it appeared somewhat accidentally: The French power company EDF, which in 2000 retained the southern third of the Tate Modern building as a substation, decided to release half of the space as part of its own modernization.

Assigned to the southwestern flank of the site, Tate Modern's new annex will in turn give new momentum to the transformation of the south bank of the Thames, a long-abandoned district that in recent years has benefited from the 20 or so cultural and entertainment institutions that now line the south bank of the river, from Westminster to Tower Bridge. Those include Royal Festival Hall, the Royal National Theater and Shakespeare's Globe Theater.