It’s a hard act to follow when one of your neighbours won the Carbuncle Cup for the worse new building in the UK in 2009 and another was the runner up in 2011. Formerly derelict warehouses and dock buildings, Mann Island has been a difficult challenge next to the historic “Three Graces” while also trying to undo some of the harm which previous developments are thought to have done.
Now that time has moved on, the Ferry Terminal which won the Carbuncle Cup in 2009 has mellowed. It has the attributes of being relatively small, free-standing and quite sculptural in from, albeit in a brutalist way. The Museum of Liverpool however is larger and more disruptive and needs improvements to the public realm and circulation. Improving the connection to the Albert Dock would make a vast improvement.
Thankfully, the potential carbuncle of carbuncles – Will Alsop’s proposals for a Fourth Grace – the “Cloud” – was cancelled due to spiralling costs. In the right location it would have been a fantastic building, but the historic riverside in Liverpool was not the right place. With this challenge, Broadway Malyan have designed the Mann Island development to be more discrete, its cladding acting as a mirror to reflect the historic architecture around it and projecting the shape of a ship’s prow from the other side of the docks.
The Mann Island development provides three buildings to contain 376 apartments, retail, restaurant and leisure units, office space and a covered courtyard for events, exhibitions and launch events for the Open Eye Gallery, the only private gallery dedicated to photography and related media in the north of England.
Established in 1977 to champion photography as an art form that is relevant to, and can be enjoyed by, everyone, while being challenging, innovative and disruptive, the Gallery has been housed in different locations, but moved here in 2011 with a photographic archive and exhibition gallery, a welcome addition to the area, with Tate Liverpool nearby in Albert Dock.
Death, our personal and society’s attitude to it, is the current challenge in the exhibition of photographs by Edgar Martins and Jordan Baseman. It is strange that with something that is so inevitable, like taxes, people are so hesitant to talk and express their feeling about it, until it sneaks up on them and it is too late.
In “Flat Death”, two artists explore death from different perspectives – Jordan Baseman reflects on the tradition of photography as a reminder of people who have passed away, very often in conjunction with the process of beatification with embalming, while Edgar Martins explores the photographer’s role in the process of death including the cold cruel world of forensic evidence.
The exhibition may be about death, but the Mann Island development is about life – breathing new life into the regeneration of Liverpool’s waterfront.
