Letter from Manchester

This city has suddenly become UK City of Most Activity. Of course it’s least of all about architecture, but people and events. What has happened at Manchester is, however, redolent of architecture too – and not the homespun regional response variety – but leapfrogging back into World Class. Also the Commonwealth Games open on 25 July.

But the latest and most brilliant event has been the opening of the Imperial War Museum North, designed by Daniel Libeskind. This remarkable building, the concept for which is best described as that of a massively exploded earth planet, was achieved on time and with great elan, despite having to reduce budget by approximately one-third, to recognise specific non-support by the Lottery Fund. There has since last year, of course, and right opposite the War Museum on the canal waterfront at Salford, been the Lowry Centre. Then, right in the centre of Manchester, the blue fin of the Urbis Museum, designed by Manchester-based architect Ian Simpson, rises from an old car park, between two key listed buildings and Manchester’s own cathedral, to form a kind of urban oasis of elegance. For internal upward circulation the building includes Europe’s first internal funicular car. This literally glides upwards at an angle of 32 degrees, carrying twenty visitors at a time to the point of departure on the uppermost level, for the four floors of exhibition space. On the fifth and sixth floors, already booked up as hospitality suites for the Games, are prestige dining areas.

Fresh from Norwich, (not to mention Portcullis House, Westminster) Michael Hopkins has added well to the City Art Museum, with its two impressive buildings by Charles Barry as ‘context’. But it is more ‘connect’, using elegantly detailed glass and stainless steel to express civility, especially where the Athenaeum that was, (formerly a grand club for merchant gentry) in Barry’s ‘Palazzo’ mode, demands deference. Hopkins provides it in a transparent manner, allowing his distillation of l960s functionalism to reveal its own provenance, as if beckoning to the future.

The building budgets begin to stack up. Libeskind’s museum cost just under £40 million. Simpson’s Urbis cost £25 million. Hopkins’ here comes in on budget at around £35 million. The Lowry Centre was substantially more than any of these. Their total is phenomenal endowment for any city with which to enter the 21st century. And Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station is itself undergoing an important transformation from the age of steam and diesel in the nick of time. The John Ryland’s Library, a great and intricately detailed Victorian building, fortunately is not changing. Nor is the Whitworth Art Gallery. Not to be confused with the Lowry Centre is the cool chill-out hotel billed as Manchester’s ‘first five-star hotel’ (a give away on self-image): ‘and when Kylie was in town it was residents only in the bar’, as the blurb has it. The hotel, a Forte venture, is also called ‘The Lowry Hotel’, leading to confusion for those hoping to stroll across to the Lowry Centre — that’s a cool ten minute taxi ride along the canal. The River Bar here at the hotel is just one of a plethora of creative bars all over the city. ‘The Study’, ‘The Living Room’, the ‘Catalan Square’, the ‘Dukes 92’ Bar, Cord, ‘The Green Room ‘, the ‘Atlas Bar’, ‘Sugar Lounge’ are just the tip of the urbis-berg. Kylie or no, resident or no, it will be hard to get back to the Lowry intact after this selection.

Graffiti artists in the city have been descending upon Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s great concrete wall in the Piccadilly Gardens, at all hours irresistible. Straight after the two concrete boxes he was commissioned to create for the new Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St Louis, Missouri, Ando comes to the city of rain, bringing concrete. Ando’s concrete is different, however, and screens the bus and tram hub on the square, from those seeking intimacy, privacy, and just somewhere to get a joint. This is a visual screening, not from the rain. On a sunny day, the rain will not stain, the graffiti will no doubt gleam, and Mancunians will have the last word on this latest arrival. There has been another harbinger.

Michael Craig-Martin’s expansive work, ‘inhale-exhale’, a site-specific installation which has just come down, having inaugurated the City Art Gallery new spaces, is indicative of the extent to which this city has leapt forward into contemporary cool. But the best of the old industrial capital remains. Manchester has a great youthfulness, this in common with Sydney by which it was vanquished for the last Olympics. It is true that Manchester should have been given the next, not Athens, thus saving the sporting world from a massive debacle now looming in the Aegean. But think what Manchester gained too, from being restricted to this year’s Commonwealth Games. Extra time and this amazing revitalised city sees the new era in with great acumen, elegance, and panache. But tell this to the Mancunians.