Arts & Culture
"Salford's Guggenheim"
Published 24 April 2000
Architecture - Hugh Aldersey-Williams on how the new Lowry Centre has put Salford on the map
The paintings of L S Lowry may not be the greatest. But what Lowry did better than almost any artist was to identify a place and its people and their lives. That place is Salford in Greater Manchester, and the people whom he portrayed have honoured him ever since.
These days, we look to architecture to provide new identity to places that might otherwise be judged not worth the detour. Michael Wilford's Lowry Centre in the Manchester docklands area, trendily renamed Salford Quays, one of a number of architectural gems to be revealed during the millennium year, is not quite "Salford's Guggenheim", as Gerald Kaufman, chairman of the Commons select committee on culture, bravely dubbed it. It is ultimately too small and too well behaved to warrant sensible comparison with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, although there are obvious shared aims, as well as the odd stylistic nod toward Spain in Wilford's design. But it will succeed on its own terms.
The building that will open next week is discreetly panelled in stainless steel. In the grey daylight, its cylindrical tower and mountainous roof line fit in immediately with the jagged horizon of ships' cranes and surviving industries that line the Salford waterways. At night, it will burst into life, as lights shine through the steel mesh, breaking the exterior into weightless blocks of glowing colour. Surrounded by water, the building cannot elude the nautical metaphor, although this is one of the more muted themes running through the building. Where the Millennium Dome contains one architectural idea writ large, the Lowry is an intimate environment overstuffed with ideas.
By day, the drama is on the inside. What has clearly been a complex building to design - full of colliding structural schemes, sloping floors, bridges and balconies - is easy and delightful to use. This is achieved thanks to the frequent vantage points, both to the canals outside, and to the milling crowds inside (it will be a great place for people-watching, and in this at least a tribute to Lowry's thronged canvases), and a colour scheme that leaves the galleries as simple white cubes, while the more important attractions - the two theatres at the heart of the complex and the inevitable "interactive creativity centre" - are coded in dramatic colour.
The Lowry hopes to draw nearly 800,000 visitors a year. Three times this number should come to Salford Quays as a whole. It is the centrepiece of a regeneration scheme that has seized upon architecture - above all, modern architecture - as the key. The Lowry is reached by an elegantly strung bridge over the Manchester Ship Canal, designed by Santiago Calatrav. Across another canal, the foundations are being laid for Daniel Libeskind's northern outpost of the Imperial War Museum, which will put Salford on the map as surely as Lowry ever did.
Wilford's is an unusually fecund modernism. As the long-time partner of the late James Stirling, he has an enviable stock-in-trade of styles to call upon. Uniquely among British architects, Stirling reimagined his creative output not once but twice, moving from brutalism to neoclassicism, and from there to a kind of constructivism, although, in his case, all labels seem facile. In doing this, he placed himself in a class with Le Corbusier and Picasso, and even, in what turns out to be the closest parallel, with Stravinsky.
To say that Wilford is now plundering this treasure chest gives a wrongful implication of derivativeness to his work. Like Stirling, he enjoys playing games and quoting themes, but this is done with such vigour and invention that theft is the least of it. The pivotal project in Stirling and Wilford's output is almost literally so: it is in two parts, like hinge-plates. The first part is the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (the backdrop building which, one might recall now with redoubled irony, Rover once used to advertise its cars, driven by a German who admiringly points out that it is by a "Britischer Architekt"). Its companion piece, occupying a similar site next door, is a new music school for the city. It is not exactly an extension or a continuation of the Staatsgalerie, but rather its negative, swapping mass for void and playing other dialectical games. So where the Staatsgalerie has a central rotunda itself, after the style of Karl Friedrich von Schinkel, the school instead has a drum-like tower - "the cork out of the bottle", as Stirling termed it.
More surprising is the fact that this self-reference is not an aberration brought about by the proximity of these two buildings, but a continuing, possibly subconscious and certainly unconfessed, addiction. So it is that recent buildings by Wilford, also in Germany, where the practice has enjoyed much success, contain echoes going back to early Stirling works such as the Florey building at Queen's College in Oxford. The Lowry is no exception. It contains some of the archetypal forms - tower, castle, cathedral cruciform - that have recurred in Stirling and Wilford's architecture since the 1970s, as well as a quotation in its saw-tooth roof from Stirling's famous engineering building at Leicester University.
"Architecture in general is frozen music," Friedrich von Schelling opined. Writing in 1809, he can only have had in mind those twin geniuses of German Romanticism: Schinkel and Beethoven. Wilford has modestly compared the Lowry with Bach's Mass in B Minor, characterising it as a compilation of bits and pieces he has always wanted to do. But contemporary architecture demands a parallel with contemporary music. Luciano Berio or Alfred Schnittke, both given to cutting and pasting classical ideas with modern glue, seem closer to the mark. These intellectual high jinks may pass Lowry visitors by. But everybody should be grateful that whatever themes ring through Wilford's building, they are nothing to do with forgotten pop songs about "matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs". Salford's new landmark is worth more than a detour; it is worth a trip.
The Lowry, Salford Quays, Greater Manchester, opens on 28 April (0161) 876 2020
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