The main thematic galleries now work like this. You encounter, for instance, an 1893 Cezanne still-life (water jug, fruit) opposite a 1980 stack of Donald Judd's aluminium and Perspex wall-mounted boxes. Why? Nittve explains: "It's about the will to order, and how that has its roots in early modernism - something that was brought to extremes in the work of Judd, Lewitt and Carl Andre."

The name of Carl Andre, like the taste of the Proustian madeleine, conjures up a vast nostalgia for times past. What a furore the Tate provoked in 1972 when it bought Andre's neat rectangular arrangement of 120 bricks, Equivalent VIII, while failing also to buy Equivalents I to VII - different arrangements of the same number of bricks, originally shown together in 1966. By displaying what could be regarded as one-eighth of a total work, the Tate guaranteed bafflement and fury. The "Tate's bricks" became a media symbol for incomprehensible modern art in the 1970s, much as Henry Moore's reclining figures with holes in had done in the 1950s, and Tracey Emin's soiled bed would do most recently. So it is comforting to find Nittve pausing dramatically in one gallery before announcing, "...and there are the bricks!" in the full knowledge of the cultural loading they have for the British. Yes, they are back, now as much-loved as Hockney's A Bigger Splash or Rodin's The Kiss.

Cornelia Parker's "Cold Dark Matter" at the Tate Modern

Outside, a giant crane is trying to hoist a huge lightbox - the last piece of new architecture by Herzog and de Meuron - onto the top of the old power station's square chimneystack. Inside, the gantry crane, originally used to move turbines hums to and fro, lifts giant mirrors onto the tops of Bourgeois' three titanic, fully accessible steel towers - the platforms on top of which form the latest in her long series of "contemplation cells" as well as being, by implication, the lair of the spider. I'll admit now that I was wrong about this installation (admirably sponsored by Unilever) when I first wrote about it in this paper - it has turned out far better than I expected in the dauntingly huge space of the turbine hall. The towers, each different, will be magical eyries to scale, the spider a weirdly disorientating presence.

But with or without the spider, the architectural tour de force of this vast, full-height public arena of an entrance hall will always dominate your experience of the whole Tate Modern. Never mind the juxtapositions between works in all those big white rooms: how can the white rooms compete with this mother of all spaces right alongside? It is to Tate Modern what the snaking external escalator tube is to Paris's Pompidou Centre - a sublime distraction.

Images courtesy of The Tate Gallery