MANCHESTER 103
Institute may well have destroyed a precious example of modern landscaping, and before that there was PMA/Progress, an exhibition at the Barbican in 2012. So? Starchitect retrospectives are a mainstay of museum programming, much like their close cousins in the art world. Much like Foster at the Pompidou this year, they are the junk food of architecture, exhibitions that are not really exhibitions of architecture at all: drawings behind glass, aerial photographs, models like sculptures, traces of work to be admired in isolation to their built reality, severed from context. But that show a decade ago whetted the architectural appetite. So here we are, an event long hoped for but scarcely expected, a major arts building in the UK by OMA.
How does an award-winning multi-talented design team, one fêted, eulogised and courted across the world, go from winning a design competition with an exciting piece of work to
delivering a box? And a box at that which is unlikely to produce anything more than a yawn, a look-a-like NASA lunar module that has pitched up beside the river, or rather some alien spaceship run up on the cheap by a local television studio, and dropped into this English Manhattan by Stanley Kubrick out of Wernher von Braun, in what will supposedly be a radiant city of the future, an alchemy of computer- generated wonder, a UFO making landfall by the Irwell. A crash landing without any sense of context or locality, a photogenic Instagram concept.
‘This is a significant project for both the firm and the city of Manchester. Was it just a vanity project for one and all? Tony Wilson must be turning in his grave’
Left A solid disappointment, OMA’s latest project comes across as an Instagram concept gone wrong
Tis is a significant project for both the firm and the city of Manchester. Was it just a vanity project for one and all? Tony Wilson must be turning in his grave. Wilson, the Granada Television reporter who started Factory Records and the Haçienda club, would not be looking back to the 1990s in naming a new arts venue. Te man who has ‘Cultural Catalyst’ engraved on his headstone would be looking forwards as he always did. Criticised by some as ‘art washing’, those behind the project believe the name provides an appropriate nod back to the city’s musical heritage of the 1980s. Four years late and with its cost up from a projected £110m, then to £186m, and now over £210m, city leaders believe the 13,000 sq m of Factory International will add £1bn to the local economy, draw 850,000 visitors a year and create or support up to 1,500 new jobs. But what about the building? Well, we all make mistakes, it’s their scale that matters. Te question is whether the new architecture (they call it transparent and acoustically sound) is any more than a shed? I’m not a gambler, but to me it looks like the second-best-looking man in an old Ealing Comedies film. A sad joke. Tis is a long way from club nights at Factory, from late 1970s punk gigs on the dystopian Hulme Estate and its legacy of a subversive avant-garde spirit. It has become official culture funded by big business and government, the flip-side of a city famed for home-grown culture. At the end of June, Factory International was renamed Aviva Studios following the insurance company acquiring naming rights for £35m, and the latest overrun of costs to be settled, the money going in part toward repaying council borrowing. But then, it wasn’t renamed. Just to complicate matters, in a confusion of identity, Aviva Studios is now the home of Factory International, ‘a landmark new cultural space for Manchester and the world’, as the blurb has it. Whatever it is, it occupies a site next to the world’s first railway station, Liverpool Road Manchester. Rising up from the banks of the Irwell in the former Victorian cotton metropolis, a striking diamond-shaped landmark was intended to become a symbol of the city’s 21st century resurgence. Te original proposal was radical and exciting. Supposedly embracing Manchester’s industrial as well as its creative past, its concrete and corrugated metal facades standing against the refurbished brick warehouses and new build flats, offices and television studios that make up the new St
John’s neighbourhood. Te main space is ‘Te Warehouse’, a par for the course, open, industrial, adaptable, multi-use shed that nods back to the Pineapple Line viaduct with its old arches incorporated into the foyer. Tis links to a 1,600-seat auditorium, ‘Te Hall’, slated for use with opera, ballet, and more conventional theatre.
In January 2017 the project got the green light as planning approval was granted. Come May 2018, the designs had been reworked, including significant revisions to the main theatre with its exterior completely remodelled, both north and south elevations of the warehouse element were ‘modified to reflect the developed structural design, and to take in account the future use of the interior space’, with much of the glazing now removed, there were ‘fewer penetrations to the listed fabric’. Te budget had been increased, and a further set of designs unveiled in September 2020. In September 2022, the opening date and programme were announced and the press went a little overboard in its universal acclaim. ‘Move over London – there’s never been a better time for culture in the north,’ said Te Times; ‘New Manchester arts venue shines light on city’s resurgence,’ was FT’s take on it; and, five years late, Te Telegraph hailed how ‘Everything turns inside out and upside down’, and stage designer Es Devlin was quoted as saying: ‘Imagine if you took the Royal Festival Hall auditorium and trucked it along the Tames to the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, then just rammed it up to the wall.’ Well, well. A spectacular range of architectural styles makes Manchester’s skyline a sight to behold. A product of the industrial revolution, and noted for its warehouses, cotton mills, viaducts and canals, it is clear that this was a city that produced and traded goods on a grand scale. Modern, contemporary, Georgian, Roman and Gothic, Manchester’s buildings have it all. Will this new addition warrant a footnote when its architectural history is rewritten? A fitting match for MediaCityUK, it may confirm cynical suspicions that ‘architecture’ is only a specialised branch of shopping. Te visionaries that gave us John Rylands Library, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Royal Exchange Teatre, Manchester Town Hall, the Free Trade Hall and Bridgewater Hall will be turning in their graves alongside Tony Wilson. So it goes. But the project has been branded. Should we be surprised? And that is certainly nothing special either, despite the fact that we are told from 2015 none less than Peter Saville was involved. Encompassing ‘original and modern’ was how Saville put it, the city as brand was at the heart of what he wanted to do to attract the punters. I leave that one to you, dear reader. Te project deserved better all round. Tis is not a building to be compared to OMA’s Performing Arts Centre in Taipei, or even the Fondazione Prada in Milan. It is ambitious, certainly, but it is not that big, and certainly not that grand. Will it shine a light on the city’s reawakening? Van Loon hails from Rotterdam, a city of ships and boats and trains; she
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