TATE MODERN WINS PLANNING APPROVAL FOR HERZOG & DE MEURON WING

Tate Modern, London’s riverside art museum, won planning approval for the new wing that Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron are building, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Beech. The revised project was backed by Southwark Council, the Tate said in an e-mailed statement last night. The project is set to be completed in 2012 at an estimated cost of $309 million, at 2012 prices. According to the museum, it has raised about $106 million to date. Tate director Nicholas Serota and architect Jacques Herzog said in July 2008 that the new building will now be a brick polygon growing out of, and resembling, the existing Tate. It was originally designed in 2006 as a jagged cast-glass pile. They denied that budgetary reasons were behind the change.