It reminds you of a ghostly warehouse, an Arctic landscape, or even giant lumps of sugar.

As you get lost among the 14,000 white boxes that make up the latest giant art work at Tate Modern, you feel compelled to describe it.

Rachael Whiteread's long-awaited installation "Embankment", which opens to the public today, is the sixth to fill the museum's Turbine Hall - one of the largest art spaces in the world.

The former Turner prize winner took five weeks to stack the 40 truck loads of boxes in odd-shaped towers of up to 40ft (12m) high.

The idea for it came when Whiteread found an old Sellotape box while clearing her late mother's house. Its battered flaps once held her toys and later Christmas decorations.

Whiteread began to think about the box as both personal and universal.

It is a "container of memory," said Catherine Wood, Tate Modern's curator of contemporary art. At the same time "everybody has used a box to pack up their belongings or shopping or whatever".

The sculptor also drew on her trip to the Arctic earlier this year, along with a group of scientists and artists who highlighted the melting ice-caps.

"I wanted to bring a sense of that place into here," Whiteread said. Her semi-translucent boxes glowed like giant ice cubes under the stark electric light.

Intimidating scale

She started with plaster casts of ten different boxes, which a factory then used to mass-produce thousands of plastic copies. Each retained the texture of the originals, complete with their riffles and dents.

To prepare for the final work, Whiteread built miniatures in her East End studio (which used to be a synagogue).

But the scale of Turbine Hall was still "intimidating", she said.

"When you are making a maquette, you are a giant working with a small-scale object. Here you are an ant working in an extremely large place."

The end result is both a flowing landscape and structured cityscape. Most visitors will first see it from the top, after which they will immerse themselves in the maze between the box towers.

The ₤400,000 work, sponsored by Unilever, follow visual spectacles, like the giant sun of Olafur Eliasson's "Weather Project" and Anish Kapoor's giant red ear trumpet "Marsyas".

Last year Bruce Nauman filled the hall with nothing but sound for "Raw Materials", his installation of 21 repetitive audio tracks.

Whiteread is one of "very few artists working internationally" who are able to take up such a huge commission, said Tate Modern's chief curator Sheena Wagstaff.

A "silent period" followed Whiteread's initial delight at the gallery's invitation, Wagstaff added. She "considered the enormity of the challenge" and countered it "admirably".

Her title "Embankment" refers to London's landscape by the River Thames. It also suggests something that has been built up.

When the show closes next April, all the boxes will be ground down and recycled.

  • Embankment, by Rachael Whiteread, is open at Tate Modern from 11 October 2005 to 2 April 2006. Admission free.