Criticism With The Imperial War Museum North, Daniel Libeskind Builds His Case for a Major Museum Destination on a Budget
Architectural Record, October 2002
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Is this formidable arrival an appropriate introduction to the regimented world of the military and the unyielding realities of war? Or is it simply clumsy architecture?
At the least, it represents the perils of budget Libeskind. The building’s apparently arbitrary curves are supposed to represent shards of “the contemporary world shattered into fragments by conflict,” as Libeskind describes it. Each represents a realm of conflict. The signboardlike vertical pylon, called the Air Shard, spears the grand vault of the Earth Shard, which contains the exhibition spaces. The Water Shard, enclosing a restaurant facing the Manchester Ship Canal, laps tentatively over Earth.
The shard idea was far more apparent in the competition design in which Libeskind proposed what he hoped would be an inexpensive composition of thin-shell concrete roofs over a pancaked zigzag volume containing the exhibitions. But several sources of funds failed to materialize and what had been projected to be a budget of about $70 million had to be pared back to a cost of just over $50 million. Given such a daunting constraint, Libeskind did not return to first principles, but reworked the design, attempting to retain its emblematic power. His office eliminated the thin curves of concrete, and folded down the metal roofing at the edges to make thick fascias instead of deep overhangs. An ambitious program of artist-designed gardens for the site was scrapped.
Libeskind’s now trademark use of architecture to physically disorient and displace the visitor’s sensibility remains largely intact once you enter the museum. The cramped entrance explodes into the nine-story vertical height of the Air Shard. On a typically bleak day, wind whistles through gaps between the metal-batten cladding, adding a haunted-house note to the spectacle of muscular criss-crossed tubular-steel supports. Visitors are invited to take an elevator which threads its way vertically through the 4.5 degree tilt of the shard to a viewing platform, where you are offered a vista over the old port, decimated by German bombs in World War II. The open, metal-grid flooring induces vertigo even in those nonagoraphobic enough to ascend in the first place.
Exhibitions do not begin until after you enter the museum proper, passing through a low-ceilinged lobby and ascend the twisting stair to the upper level. The permanent exhibits occupy an enormous single space under the curved vault of the Earth Shard ceiling. With zigzagging outer walls, a U.S. Marines Harrier jet apparently crashing through a partition, and jagged “silos” enclosing small, roomlike thematic presentations, the space’s full extent is not immediately visible, but you are urged to explore its furthest reaches. The gently domed asphalt floor, echoing the roof’s curve, insistently, perhaps unconsciously, tickles your nerve endings.
Libeskind’s visceral approach–physically jarring you out of the confines of the everyday into the maelstrom of war–matches the museum’s mission perfectly. “We made a conscious decision to allow ourselves to go into emotional territory,” says Forrester. The intention to consider the effects of conflict rather than merely to trace it historically, transformed the visitor experience from a passive one of gazing onto objects into one where artifacts and interpretation are used to stimulate questions and conversation. Indeed, much of the collection housed here is stored in a computerized stack system. Docents (cloyingly called “interactors”) fetch up items in response to visitor interest or to make a point: you may view a letter from a soldier that arrived on exactly the same day as a telegram informing his family that he died. “The building sets you up for something different,” says Forrester. “And it challenged us to create as bold an experience as the building offers.”
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