The largest of the five slides is 55.5 metres long and drops 26.5 metres. © Tate

Part sculpture, part fun-fair ride, the new installation in Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall consists of five huge slides connecting galleries that visitors are encouraged to hurtle down.

German artist Carsten Höller has transformed the hall with his gleaming metal slides, called Test Site, the largest of which drops five stories (26.5 metres to be exact) and is 55.5 metres long. All have a gradient of between 30 and 35 degrees.

Departing from levels 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the building, the tubes end up at a brightly lit ‘arrival hall’ where the sliders’ arrival can be seen by all. Höller is interested in tubes as a means of transport and how it affects people who use them, believing them to be therapeutic.

Höller is interested to see how sliders react to the experience. © Tate

“Carsten Höller has eloquently and innovatively transformed our means of navigating in the vast space of the Turbine Hall,” said Vicente Todolí, Director of Tate Modern. “In addition, he has offered an experience, the results or effect of which we have yet to understand.”

Unlike some of the earlier commissions to fill the hall the slides use the whole length of the building and were constructed in full view of the public.

Built to strict safety standards, sliders on the higher chutes have a cotton sack to step into to stop them burning themselves on the way down and attendants will be on hand to control the flow of people.

The chutes end up at a central arrival zone. © Tate

Höller was born in Brussels in 1961 and his previous work includes slide installations in Berlin, New York, Helsinki, Milan and Boston. His Milan creation was for the Prada building, where it connects Miuccia Prada’s personal office to her car.

This is not Höller’s first work to be shown at Tate Modern – he also created a maze of electronic sliding doors that was shown in 2003.

The slides are the seventh of the yearly Unilever series of installations in the Turbine Hall. Previous works have included Rachel Whiteread’s cascading display of white cubes, Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider sculptures and Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, which created the illusion of a giant setting sun at the end of the great hall.