Jeremy Deller’s Procession
July 6th, 2009
Jeremy Deller’s Procession, Manchester, 5 July 2009
While the commissioning of an art event might not have the authentic resonance of a traditional urban ritual (such as the Roman Triumph, or Holy Week in Seville), this populist production for the Manchester International Festival had much to gladden the jaded urbanist’s heart. It had a Roman road, Deansgate, to process along between the castrum origins and the later medieval core. It had an eager and appreciative crowd gathered along the route. And it had a series of familiar and unfamiliar sections evoking some mythic scenarios.
The Rose Queens of Manchester’s largely defunct Whit Walks traditions were joined by a robust outing from The Ramblers. The all-singing, all-dancing, mock-baroque of ‘The Adoration of the Chip’ contrasted with a fleet of hearses commemorating closed but legendary nightclubs, from The Hacienda to Rotters. The Big Issue Sellers and Unrepentant Smokers (followed by a sobering health warning) provided the smudge of ‘gritty northern realism’ but the procession concluded with the crowd gleefully following along Deansgate. The pied pipers were, alas, not the Shree Swaminarayan Gadi Pipe Band from Bolton, but the equally delightful Caribbean steel band Steel Harmony, sweetly syncopating the works of The Buzzcocks and Joy Division.
Perhaps the performance of Procession did not have the transcendent qualities of a great urban narrative reenactment, but it said more about the notions of civic pride and place than the banal receptacles of spectacular consumption which form Manchester’s recent cosmetically enhanced cityscape.
The post-event exhibition runs at Cornerhouse Manchester July 9 – 23 August.
Cashing in the CHIPS
April 30th, 2009
The landscape of urban desolation which New Islington still remains as we plumb the depths of the recession has been recently complemented by the unveiling of Will Alsop’s long awaited CHIPS apartment building. Uncannily similar to the computer simulation produced as part of the marketing campaign, the project constitutes one of the fingers of Alsop’s 2002 masterplan for the Urban Splash development in East Manchester. The brightly-coloured reveals, the super-graphics and the waterside location will perhaps distract the architectural tourist from the brittle quality of the building’s construction. The bus stops are in place to ferry residents, but seven years after inception one would still have to be a very optimistic pioneer to invest your hard-won mortgage in this key example of contemporary urban anomie.
In an attempt to ameliorate an existing, historic and celebrated example of urban anomie (that’s enough anomie, Ed.) Urban Splash are also involved in Park Hill in Sheffield. A documentary about English Heritage’s role in the structure’s conservation will be screened on May 1 at 9.00pm on BBC2. Mayday! Mayday!
It’s naff up north?
March 23rd, 2009
The provincial insecurities which plague issues of urban design in Manchester surface again with these two proposals for familiar landmarks. The austere sublimity which might be thought to characterise the best of Manchester’s civic and industrial architecture had no need to soften its impact. It was robust, not to say blunt and thought the citizens could respect that self confidence, indeed have a sneeking regard for it and react accordingly.
Perhaps it’s the imminent arrival of attention-deficient media-types at MediaCity which has suggested that the deliberately unsettling air shard on Daniel Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum - North needs a shower of cherry blossom in the foreground, or the stunning and unique Library Walk between Vincent Harris’s Central Library and Town Hall Extension requires a glass canopy? We might assume that the economic downturn will dispose of these naff proposals but perhaps it is time for the Vincent Harris Vigilantes to engage in an ‘historic compromise’ with the Daniel Libeskind Vigilantes?
More on Vincent Harris’s masterpiece
Vincent Harris Vigilantes Awake!
Order Revealed
February 22nd, 2009
Order revealed during demolition at 2-4 Oxford Road. Compare with Leon Krier’s satirical reinforced concrete order from ‘Houses, Palaces, Cities’*.
*Porphyrios, Demetri, ed. Leon Krier: Houses, Palaces, Cities. London, 1984
**The building in the background is the former Refuge Assurance building (now Palace Hotel) designed by Paul Waterhouse 1891-1912.
So farewell then, 2-4 …
February 17th, 2009
CiA are saddened to witness the demolition of 2-4 Oxford Road in Manchester. It provided an atmospheric and convivial, though cramped, studio space in the early hopeful years. We need more spaces like that in the city not less.
Editor’s note: Projects conceived at 2-4 included schemes for Bradford, Davis, Genoa and Llangadfan. 2-4 Oxford Road was the birthplace of Camlin Lonsdale Landscape Architects and the site of Eleri Mills’ Manchester studio.
By John Rylands Library I sat down and wept…
January 15th, 2009
While the scholastic gloom of Basil Champneys’s John Rylands Library (1899) on Deansgate in Manchester perhaps offers no direct model for contemporary emulation, the quality of its construction and longevity of its use and occupation present a sharp riposte to the disposable buildings and spaces of today. This lamentable situation is exemplified by the latest miserable product of retail/office space, 2 Spinningfields Square, which has appeared adjacent to the “last significant flowering of Gothic in the city”.
It is difficult to know how to account for such a situation. Apparently the product of a masterplan, the office buildings of the Spinningfields development stand around the area awkwardly misaligned with each other and unconvincingly heterogenous in their exterior forms, different wrappings around the same sort of functional space. But at least they have a genuine potential for use, unlike the public realm of the area, where the same futile decorative mentality attempts to modify the obvious meaninglessness of the space. Throughout the Spinningfields development the public spaces are particularly redundant, lacking the sort of fluid changes of occupation one would witness in an authentic place. The new spaces are there to provide hierarchy to otherwise largely indistinguishable buildings, to ‘add value’ in the cost per square metre of an address on a ‘square’, over one on a ‘boulevard’, over one on an ‘avenue’. Urban space in these situations is part of the commodification of urban property rather than providing a genuinely public realm.
Looking ahead, the new spaces created as part of the Spinningfields development are so stupendously formless they can only indicate their eventual occupation by yet more office building. Large patches of lawn suggest future development plots which might give more definition to these late manifestations of s.l.o.a.p. (space left over after planning). Lines of skater-proof benches provide rhythm of potential occupation, although hard up against the glass elevation of the Civil Justice Centre, they offer little prospect of comfort, let alone a view. In Hardman Square the enigmatic forms of polished black stone attempt to provide interest to the yawning space which opens out towards the monuments of early twentieth century Manchester, the rear and stage door of Sir Albert Richardson’s Opera House and the roofscape of Joseph Sunlight’s Sunlight House. This public space complements the essentially private functions of the work place, while the cultural and civic monuments, the Rylands Library, the Crown Court and (perhaps thankfully) the new Magistrates’ Court struggle for a public presence against their newer, attention seeking, commercial neighbours, with their V-sign columns, confusingly suppressed entrances, ineffective signage, and the visual detritus of internal occupation.
The package of aspirations which the occupant is offered by Spinningfields represents a particularly impoverished form of urbanism. Attention lights on the palette of accumulated brands precisely because the physical environment (buildings and spaces) in which they are contained is so banal and devoid of consolation. Individuality is reduced to the illumination of corporate logos and the complexity provided by a gratuitous and hard to occupy plan form, producing 2 Spinningfields Square as a reductio ad absurdam. Nothing more underlines the inappropriateness of this particular commercial bauble to the present economic circumstances than the promotional CGI film where two
improbably refined financial services employees divert themselves with a few minutes of retail therapy before the inevitable arrival of their redundancy notices. Go to www.theavenuemanchester.com and click the link to TAKE A WALK.
Small earthquake?
November 24th, 2008
A rather bland interview with David Dernie, outgoing Head of the Manchester School of Architecture, has appeared on the AJ site: LINK
Old Manchester
September 26th, 2008
In the period before Manchester’s recent building boom Leach Rhodes and Walker was the finishing school for a number of Manchester School of Architecture tutorial staff (not me!) and was the source of countless amusing anecdotes about commercial architectural practice. Their two-storey, black granite-clad office building on the Irwell was complemented by the rigour of the firm’s reported social structure in the ‘eighties: technical architects on one floor, design architects on another.
A recent article in Building Design speculating on the status of a number of Manchester firms questioned the firm’s solvency. BD has Backed Down (page 3 bottom right hand corner) and apologised in this week’s issue for suggesting that Leach Rhodes and Walker had become insolvent in the last quarter.
Picture shows on the right Manchester House (formerly Scottish Life House) 1965 by Leach Rhodes & Walker and on the left Albert Bridge House by E.H Banks (Ministry of Works) 1958-1959. Picture by Neil Wilkinson (License)
Old Manchester Town Hall 1834-1912
August 26th, 2008
Architecture in the raw
Photographed just before its destruction in 1912 Manchester’s pre-Waterhouse Town Hall was the subject of study by students at the Manchester School of Architecture published in 1915.
Few buildings of this quality have ever been demolished except during a war. Empty of people, furniture, and paintings with flecks of debris on the uncovered floor we see its spaces in their purest form.
Waterhouse and Harris - safe in their hands?
July 10th, 2008
Further to a post earlier this year the potential fate of Manchester Town Hall (Alfred Waterhouse), its Extension and Central Library (E. Vincent Harris) becomes clearer. The Manchester Evening News story about the future of the most significant urban and architectural ensemble in the city should raise fears in the minds of any concerned citizen. Among the questions that occur are
- why does a library and a town hall need shops?
- will cars in the new underground carpark be exempt from the proposed congestion charge?
- what has happened to the spirit of civic pride which produced these great buildings, and why does it have such a faint voice in the deliberations of the council?
Architecture elsewhere
June 16th, 2008
Land towers
Shelter
Large paintings by James Bowyer, BA Fine Art show. First floor Grosvenor Building (the old Art School).
