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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The museum’s major drawing card is The Big Picture Show, in which every wall surface becomes a screen for 15-minute-long thematic sound and light presentations. The budget mandated nonglitzy technology in the form of 35mm slide projectors, but the museum’s extraordinary image archives guarantee a riveting immersion in the subject offered. If people view these presentations as passive infotainment, the museum’s risky mission will have failed. Forrester says that so far they do stimulate a consideration of the risks and rewards war entails: “People linger and talk. We can’t get them out.” And visitor figures are comfortably over projections. The half-life of innovative museums can be short, however. The exhibitions at the Berlin Jewish Museum have failed to live up to the expectations created by Libeskind’s building and are being revamped.
Libeskind gamely claims that revisiting every aspect of the design in a quest to reduce costs actually improved it, but the process of stripping down the design seems to have stripped out the multiple readings and layers of meaning Libeskind was able to offer in Berlin. As in Berlin (which took 11 excruciating years), he soldiered on in the face of adversity. But at some point someone needed to commit to matching the resources to the vision or go with another idea better tuned to the modesty of the commitment. Because Manchester, in spite of enormous dedication and commitment on the part of Libeskind and the museum’s own team, has ended up with little more than fun-house effects, like the dizzying platform in the Air Shard.
The Imperial War Museum has been well-received in most of the European press, so I had to ask myself why the finished building so deflated my expectations for it. The bleak setting and too-low budget reminded me of the doomed attempts by American cities to spur regeneration by trying to take some idea that succeeded elsewhere and implant it without the talent and commitment that went into the original¬‚Bilbao on a budget. Neighboring the museum across the Manchester Ship Canal is The Lowry, a bombastic big-budget performing arts center recently completed by Michael Wilford. It gestures importantly across a bleak plaza to an outlet mall. With capital-C culture and low-c commerce united, you find the stock ingredients of 21st-century urban regeneration plopped willy-nilly in this post-industrial no-mans’ land–and it could not be more dispiriting. Spectacle architecture can’t be expected to work any better than the favored alternative, watered-down historicism, when it lacks a fundamental commitment of resources and is unmoored from any apparent vision of what this part of Manchester should be.