CUBE
12.05.02 - 04.07.02
Image:
Curated by Tom Jeffries
Organised by Graeme Russell
12.05.02 - 04.07.02
Some of
Manchester's most exciting buildings date from the 1960s. So why has it
turned its back on the era? asks Jonathan Glancey.
"Imagine exiting Manchester's Piccadilly station soon after the blue electrics arrived from London Euston in 1966. Gateway House, the modern station office building designed by Colonel Richard Seifert, towered over you. A sweep of modern shops curved down to Piccadilly itself. In the 1963 film of Keith Waterhouse's comic novel Billy Liar, there is a scene in which Julie Christie crosses Piccadilly Plaza; all around her the new 1960s architecture is being constructed. It seems like an age ago.
"Imagine exiting Manchester's Piccadilly station soon after the blue electrics arrived from London Euston in 1966. Gateway House, the modern station office building designed by Colonel Richard Seifert, towered over you. A sweep of modern shops curved down to Piccadilly itself. In the 1963 film of Keith Waterhouse's comic novel Billy Liar, there is a scene in which Julie Christie crosses Piccadilly Plaza; all around her the new 1960s architecture is being constructed. It seems like an age ago.
Was the early 1960s a false dawn for Manchester? Liverpool
had stolen a march in music, but its rival at the other end of the ship
canal was much better connected to the rest of Britain and Europe. As
Manchester tried to reinvent itself, it began to look the part of a
modern, business-driven city. In 1960, Manchester Midland station was
connected to London St Pancras by the svelte new Blue Pullman service, a
fast, air-conditioned diesel train that seemed light years ahead of the
four-hour steam services from Piccadilly to Euston.
Within the next few years came the electrification of the west coast
main line with the new blue-and-grey InterCity trains belting down to
London in just two and a half hours. To cash in on the Manchester
business market, BEA put its new DeHavilland Trident jets on the route
to Heathrow. The motorway closed in and there was a plan, since
abandoned, to build an orbital super road. An architecture rose
up on concrete foundations to match the ambition of this dashing new
InterCity world. All cool Swiss graphics and designer logos, it was as
if those giants of modern architecture, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe, had ventured to Manchester.
Just look at the
Manhattan-like CIS Tower (GS Hay and Sir John Burnet, Tait and Partners;
interiors by Sir Misha Black and the Design Research Unit, 1962). In
the right light it looks a bit like the sort of thing Mies was designing
at the time for downtown Toronto: bronze-framed banks with
travertine-lined lobbies potted with abstract sculptures. Or, it is a
cluster of sleek towers, borrowing from SOM (Skidmore Owings and
Merrill), who gave the US its corporate architectural look until
postmodern design bludgeoned its way on to the skylines of New York and
Chicago. Elsewhere in Manchester, there were bold new offices such as
Aldine House (Leach, Rhodes and Walker, 1967) and, further out, the
muscular Middleton council offices (Israel Lyons and Ellis, 1965).
If
you look closely, and in the wrong light, the Mancunian office
buildings of the InterCity era are not up to the impeccable standards of
Mies. "There was a spirit of optimism and confidence in buildings of
this period in Manchester, says Graeme Russell, director of the city's
Cube gallery. "But the light here is often drab so we
commissioned G.ten, a group of photographers, to portray these buildings
afresh as if they were bathed in the kind of west coast light that
makes Julius Schulman's photographs of new Californian architecture of
the 50s and 60s so seductive." But today's architecture is not so
seductive. "When you look at what's happening in the city now, in
architectural terms, it's disappointing...it's, for the most part, apologetic, second-rate, po-mo stuff, and it keeps getting built."
Manchester
International, the new exhibition at Cube curated by Tom Jefferies of
the Manchester School of Architecture, is an intriguing attempt to
re-evaluate the very architecture that, for whatever reason, Manchester
appears to have turned its back on. The city plays up its spectacular
Victorian heritage - and why not when the neo-Gothic City Hall by Alfred
Waterhouse is one of Europe's greatest civic buildings?
Yet a
modern masterpiece, such as the Piccadilly Plaza and Hotel (Covell
Matthews, 1964), a concrete mega-structure that rivalled the best of
avant-garde French and Japanese contemporary design, is under threat
after years of physical neglect and visual abuse. The hotel was given a
sprucing up in the early 1990s, but not in the spirit of the 1960s
design it was conceived in. "It's like a set from Thunderbirds,"
says Jefferies, "with its great concrete cantilevers and spiral entry
ramp. Now it looks as if it's going to be clad in shiny silver panels;
the whole point of its design will be lost." If this genuinely exciting
1960s building was in London, New York or almost anywhere on the
continent, it would have been snapped up by a hotelier such as Ian
Schrager, who would respect its design and could turn it into a
hyper-fashionable overnight stay...there is something about the crispness of this early 1960s
vision that is attractive as we emerge from the slough of postmodern
design.
If Manchester city council, local businesses and
developers wanted to, they could trade on the city's 1960s heritage as
much as they milk its Victorian lineage. What has put them off? Why do
they seem out of step with the design tastes of a younger generation
who would love to hang out in a swish new bar in a sensitively revamped
Piccadilly Hotel?
Two words come to mind: Arndale Centre. This
absurdly ugly 1970s retail termites' nest was meant to transform the
heart of the city. It did, but much to its detriment. Far from being an
update of an elegant Victorian shopping arcade, the Arndale Centre
became a byword for bad modern architecture. It has been remodelled
since the IRA bomb that devastated central Manchester five years ago,
but it gave the city a bad name for years.
Manchester,
especially now it has its successful tram network, upbeat Chinatown and
buzzy nightlife, does have the air, on a good day, of a confident
European city. Each weekend, some 140,000 visitors come to indulge in
the city's boozy nightlife. Huge sums have been spent on rebuilding the
centre, smartening up the Canal Street quarter, building a major new
sports complex on the edge of the city, lining the canal with yuppie
apartment blocks, stretching the investment down to Salford Quays, the
bombast of the Lowry Centre and the explosion of ideas that give form to
Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North.
What the city
needs now is to rethink what a modern look could actually mean in
architectural and design terms. A little less of the late flowering and
now wilting postmodern would help; this and some energetic buildings
with the confidence and optimism of the Manchester International period. Cube itself is helping to lead the way with its new restaurant,
designed by Daniel Libeskind and due to open next spring. David
Chipperfield has rebuilt the Cornerhouse art gallery, Michael Hopkins is
at work extending the city art gallery and Tadao Ando has designed a
pavilion for Piccadilly gardens. Now, who can rescue the Piccadilly
Hotel?"
Image:
Aldine House, Leach Rhodes Walker, 1966
‘Counterbalancing pre cast sculptural concrete panels and
articulated round cornered stair towers with a miesian black marble
pavilion, it neatly counterpoints restraint with expressionism in a
scheme that was envisaged would range from 5 storeys to 16’ (Tom Jefferies). Photography: GTen, Michale Pollard
* This article, entitled The Wonder Years, was originally published in The Guardian in 2001. Jonathan Glancey is an architectural critic and writer who was the architecture and design editor at The Guardian, a position he held from 1997 to February 2012. He previously held the same post at The Independent. He is an honorary fellow of the RIBA.
Curated by Tom Jeffries
Organised by Graeme Russell