Criticism With The Imperial War Museum North, Daniel Libeskind Builds His Case for a Major Museum Destination on a Budget
Architectural Record, October 2002
Daniel Libeskind sliced forebodingly empty spaces through the galleries in Berlin’s Jewish Museum to remind visitors of the abrubt end of centuries of Jewish culture at the hands of the Nazis. He did not shrink when asked to depict in the fabric of a building the tragic life of painter Felix Nussbaum, whose short life ended in the ever-tightening vice of the Final Solution. And in Manchester, in the haunted heartland of Britain’s vanished 19th-century industrial might, he has now attempted to convey to school children and daytrippers the tragic effects of war in the Imperial War Museum North (IWMN).
In Libeskind, the professional is personal. Fascism drove his family from Poland to the Bronx when he was a child. Death camps immolated relatives. “ ¬åImperial,’ ¬åwar,’ and ¬åmuseum,’ are the three worst words in the English language,” he observes with a characteristically heavy-handed rhetorical flourish. So why did he take on this outpost of a museum whose headquarters in the former London asylum called Bedlam is festooned with the armed bellicosity of sun-never-sets empire? The professional: “The challenge is to get the public to want to come to a museum about conflict,” he says. The personal: “I would not be alive had the Allies not taken up conflict with the Nazis,” he said in an interview. “This museum doesn’t celebrate war, it shows the difficulty of attaining peace.”
His passion, tenacity and ambition have taken him down an unusual path in this era of emotional distance. His work evokes the “speaking architecture” of the French 18th-century, in which the very fabric of the structure is intended to change you, to prepare you to experience things differently. His approach appealed to the IWMN museum trustees because it expressed so well the intention to make more of a war museum than a bombastic paean to heroism or an exploitation of the power and sex appeal of armaments. This branch’s mission was, says director Jim Forrester, “to think about war’s effect on people. We are interested in the toil and sacrifice of the armed forces, but also the people behind the scenes, those who stayed home and those who were caught in the middle.”
But as you leave Manchester’s hard-bitten but revitalizing city center, you wonder just what Libeskind has gotten himself into. Well before you arrive, the building’s silvery interlocking curves announce its presence across the considerable emptiness of what was once among the world’s largest inland ports but is today a vast flat plain dotted randomly with industrial leftovers and the occasional parking-lot fronted retail strip. The museum’s shiny roof folds over dark-painted almost windowless walls of concrete. Surrounded by a fence (erected to foil vandals and terrorists alike), the building sits on an unarticulated expanse of asphalt. The initial effect is of Sam’s Club with Style.
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