Hasta La Ideas

Here is a complete set of photographs of the heavily criticised Museum of Liverpool by Danish architects 3XN, which opened to the public last month.

Top: photograph by Pete Carr

The bulky dockside museum features huge projecting windows at either end, one facing towards the city centre and the other out across the River Mersey.

Limestone panels surround the facade and are shaped as zig-zagging diamonds on the side elevations, creating the illusion that the building has been stretched.

A staircase spirals up through an atrium at the heart of the museum, leading to three floors of galleries that exhibit social history and popular culture.

Above: photograph by Pete Carr

Although designed by 3XN, the project was delivered by UK studio AEW Architects.

Above: photograph by Pete Carr

Since the museum’s opening it has been unpopular with critics (see our earlier Dezeen Wire) and has since been nominated by Building Design magazine to receive The Carbuncle Cup for the ugliest building completed in the UK in the past 12 months.

Above: photograph by Pete Carr

Other stories from the Dezeen archive about 3XN include an educational building in Copenhagen with colourful window shutters – see all our stories about 3XN here.

Above: photograph by Pete Carr

The museum is the third to be published on Dezeen this month – see our earlier stories about a boomerang-shaped museum on stilts that bridges a road and cantilevers over a lake and an underground museum with weathered steel towers – click here to see all our stories about museums.

Photography is by Phillip Handforth, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here are some more details from 3XN:

3XN’s Museum of Liverpool: More than a Building, More than a Museum

The new Museum of Liverpool, opening on July 19th will not only tell the story of its importance as one of the World’s great ports or about its cultural influence, such as with the Beatles phenomenon. It will also serve as a meeting point for History, the People of Liverpool and visitors from around the globe. Therefore, according to the Architect, Kim Herforth Nielsen, the structure functions as much more than just a Building or a Museum.

The Result of a Rigorous Process

As the largest National Museum to be built in the UK in over 100 years, and situated on a UNESCO World Heritage Site next to Liverpool’s famous ’Three Graces,’ Principal Architect and Creative Director at 3XN Kim Herforth Nielsen was fully aware of the magnitude of the challenge, when it came to designing the new Museum of Liverpool.

’This is one of the largest and most prestigious projects in 3XN’s 25 year history. The Museum’s design is a result of a very rigorous process, where it was of utmost priority to listen to the city inhabitants, learn the city’s history and understand the potential of the historical site that the Museum now sits upon.’

The result is a dynamic low-rise structure which enters into a respectful dialogue with the harbour promenade’s taller historical buildings. This interaction facilitates a modern and lively urban space. The design is reminiscent of the trading ships which at one time dominated the harbour, while the façade’s relief pattern puts forward a new interpretation of the historical architectural detail in the ‘Three Graces.’ The enormous gabled windows open up towards the City and the Harbour, and therefore symbolically draw history into the Museum, while at the same time allow the curious to look in.

A Nexus

The Museum lies along the Mersey River in the center of Liverpool, and will function as a nexus, in that it physically connects the Harbour promenade with the Albert Dock, which today contains restaurants, museums and boutiques. The outdoor areas around the Museum offer seating with views to the water adding to the dynamic urban environment and serving as a meeting point for locals and visitors alike.

The theme is carried through into the Museum of Liverpool’s central atrium, with its sculptural sweeping staircase leading up to the galleries further encouraging social interaction. All of these functions result in Kim Herforth Nielsen choosing to describe the Museum as a structure that unites Liverpool.

’This Museum connects the city together on many levels – physically, socially and architecturally. The idea of creating a Museum as a nexus in both physical and symbolic expression has been central from the start. I am very satisfied to see that this ideal is carried out to the full in the completed structure.’

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A striking new addition to Liverpool

Dr David Fleming OBE, Director of National Museums Liverpool, is thrilled with 3XN’s design and looks forward to welcoming visitors to the museum: ‘To design the building we appointed Danish architects 3XN, who responded to our requirement (…) The resulting structure is a striking addition to the Liverpool cityscape. I can’t wait to open the doors to visitors to show off our new museum and encourage others to discover more about this extraordinary city.’

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Architect: 3XN
Address: Mann Island, Liverpool, United Kingdom
Client: National Museums Liverpool
Size: 13.000 m2
Engineer: Buro Happold

See also:

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The Hepworth Wakefield by David Chipperfield	Museum of Fine Arts by Rick Mather	La Llotja de Lleida by Mecanoo

Now that it’s nearly been a full week since the “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the full reports on the triumphant, record-setting success it was for the museum are starting to come out. First, the Met issued a full total count of visitors who passed through the exhibition: a whopping 661,509, placing it at number eight in their Top 10 list of most popular shows they’ve ever had in their 141-year history. Among that nearly three-quarters of million people, it’s been announced that 23,000 wound up signing up for memberships somewhere along the way, which go from anywhere between $70 and $550. As the Wall Street Journal writes, this being more than double the amount who signed up last year over the same period of time, is sure to give the museum a nice boost, particularly in the face of continued rocky financial times. However, it wasn’t all good news in the membership department. DNAinfo reports that a letter was sent out this week to all members, apologizing that they’d stopped letting them cut in line this past weekend while the museum was thronged with last minute visitors, which sometimes resulted in lines lasting up to five hours just to get into the exhibit. “Our goal throughout this period of high demand was to balance our commitments to access and safety, for both our visitors and our collections,” wrote director Thomas Campbell in his conciliatory letter. But in the end, it’s assumed that even though those last minute straggling members were miffed, they still stayed put and stuck it out. Finally, Jezebel recently took a look at the numbers, did some analysis, and came up with a rough estimation of how much the Met raked in over the short run of the exhibition: $14,603,862. Not too shabby at all. Though one can assume that some of that was eaten up a bit with the overhead of hiring more security, paying staff overtime and just leaving the museum open for so many additional hours (cooling that building down with A/C certainly can’t be cheap).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Quoth the Baltimore city planning department: nevermore. Okay, we’ll admit that that’s a downright terrible joke in the face of the sad subject matter and perhaps the laziest segue into a post ever, but it’s early and the middle of the week, so what can you do? Moving on… Even though the crippling financial downfall that took countless museums and cultural institutions down with it seemed to have slowly lessened over the past year or two, the NY Times reports that another museum has fallen on hard times and is facing closure: the Edgar Allen Poe House and Museum.The paper writes that, due to budget cutbacks, last year Baltimore stripped away its $85,000 annual support for the museum, which resides in the house Poe himself lived in for two years in the 1830s. Without that funding, and the fact that their visitor numbers have been extremely low, given that it’s located “amid a housing project, far off this city’s tourist beaten path,” unless their current financial situation is remedied, the museum will run out of money and be forced to close sometime next summer. Fundraising efforts thus far have been mildly successful, but those behind the museum see only two options for its ongoing survival: the city turns back on the annual support or someone steps in with loads of money to help bail it out.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos have completed an underground museum in Spain with weathered steel towers and cylinders that emerge above a grass lawn (photographs by Roland Halbe and Fernando Alda).

Top and above: photography by Roland Halbe

The Interactive Museum of the History of Lugo exhibits objects, images and films that illustrate the historic Roman city and province.

Above: photography by Fernando Alda

Visitors enter the building via a spiralling staircase that descends into a submerged circular courtyard.

Above: photography by Fernando Alda

Three cylindrical towers provide enclosed rooms for audio-visual installations and are surrounded by the underground exhibition galleries.

Above: photography by Fernando Alda

Parking for cars and buses is also provided underneath the landscape.

Above: photography by Roland Halbe

Weathered steel has featured in a few recent Dezeen stories – see our earlier stories about a canopy of flattened parasols and a museum pierced by bullet-sized holes.

Above: photography by Roland Halbe

This is the third museum by Spanish architects Nieto Sobejano featured on Dezeen this summer, following one with a perforated aluminium skin and another in a ruined castle – see all our stories about Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos here.

Above: photography by Roland Halbe

Fernando Alda shows more photographs of this project on his website.

Here is some more text from the architects:

Interactive Museum of the History of Lugo
1st Prize Competition 2007

The building site, which until not long ago housed industrial structures- is located in a position relatively displaced from the historic centre of Lugo. However, it will soon become a point of arrival for visitors to the city.

It may well seem awkward to assimilate architecture into landscape, but this is one of the cases in which we would like to think that the relationship between the two is more than a set phrase. We propose a museum-park or a park-museum, which will be linked to the sequence of green areas in the city, hiding the parking areas underground and emerging in a constellation of cylindrical lanterns scattered throughout a continuous green field.

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As it happens every time an architectural idea is intended to be built –which very frequently emerges from intuition-, it is the analysis of the program and its location that causes the specific proposal to make sense. We will divide the program into two large, connected areas: the parking and the visitor centre. The strong difference in height between the East and West ends of the building site suggests the possibility of taking +444m as an average reference level, in such a way that the garage is developed nearly at street level, thus remaining half-buried.

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The Visitor Centre is essentially organised on a single floor illuminated through large circular courtyards, which allow natural light to penetrate and permit independent, controlled use. From the main courtyard, the most peculiar and tallest exhibition rooms will emerge -as contemporary cylindrical bastions-, which will become the image of the new building which is projected towards the exterior.

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The exhibiting area has been conceived from two types of spaces: one which is neutral, flexible, suitable for the exhibition of panels, and will contain interactive modules or glass cabinets with original pieces; the other is defined by three cylindrical bastions, which are peculiar spaces due to their shape and dimension, suitable for audiovisual installations and projections. Both the Museum and the Visitor Centre are articulated in a sequence of interior and exterior spaces with multiple itineraries in which the landscape and History will be able to convey the intimate link that unites them.

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Awareness towards environmental issues is a consequence of the project’s conception itself. The strong impact that a large amount of vehicles -cars and buses- would have produced on the surface is avoided by hiding the parking area under the undulating cover of vegetation. Likewise, the spaces destined for visitors and the museum occupy a half-buried floor under the same green foliage, which favours thermal inertia, thus reducing the need for energy contribution.

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The exhibition towers emerging from the garden will be externally re-covered by a light, metallic skin, which will accommodate the incorporation of solar panels and night-time lighting in its design, by way of a contemporary interpretation of the Roman wall’s bastions.

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The new Museum will entail the experience of a walk through a vegetative, metallic landscape, a luminous field whose night-time glow will seem to emerge from within the earth. The Lugo Museum will evoke images of fields and caves, walls and fortified towers –metaphors of a landscape and a culture that the inhabitants of Lugo carry within their own memory.

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Location: Avda. Infanta Elena. Lugo. Spain
Client: Ayuntamiento de Lugo
Architects: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, S.L.P. – Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano

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Project Architect: Alexandra Sobral
Proyect Coordination: Vanesa Manrique
Collaborators: Borja Ruiz-Apilánez, Juan Carlos Redondo, Bart de Beer, Rocío Domínguez
Site Supervision: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, S.L.P. – Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano
Miguel Mesas Izquierdo, Technical Architect
Structure: NB 35 S.L.
Mechanical Engineer: 3i Ingeniería Industrial, S.L.
Models: Juan de Dios Hernández – Jesús Rey, Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, S.L.P.
Project: 2007
Construction: 2008-2011
Construction Company: U.T.E. Aldesa – Cuadernas

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See also:

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Riverside Museum by Zaha Hadid	Roku Museum by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP	Celtic Museum by Kada Wittfeld Architektur

How an experimental art collective turned a field into a puppy opera, lawnmower symphony and more

Chiefly interested in the “intersections between different fields of knowledge,” like all good art collectives, Machine Project’s objectives are sometimes frustratingly vague. Loose definitions on their site span “informal educational institution” to host of “scientific talks, poetry readings and group naps.” But if one thing is consistent about the L.A. nonprofit, it’s that every undertaking is steeped in radical creativity.

With seemingly unfiltered conceptual thinking, founder Mark Allen’s wide-reaching collaborations manage to translate the group’s raw ideas into crowd-pleasing installations. Most recently Machine Project took up a two-week residency at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center during the museum’s Open Field series of outdoor art events, resulting in a collection of site-specific performance pieces.

Set to a live singing performance, Elizabeth Cline’s 10-minute operetta “Tragedy on the Sea Nymph” featured an all-dog cast acting as lovers shipwrecked at sea.

Another project involving animals, “The American Lawn, and Ways To Cut It” explored the sonic nature of the grass at Walker, using “sheep, choreographed gasoline-powered ride-on mowers with mounted oscillators tuned to the drone of their engines, and push mowers,” which were strung with tinkling bells.

Influenced by architecture, Machine Project’s Curator of Sound Chris Kallmyer was the driving force behind the lawn event and another experimental study in sound called “Music For Parking Garages.” The talented trumpeter and fellow musicians tested the limits of sound in a cavernous parking garage, playing to whoever pulled up a bean bag chair for a listen.

Sound artist Kamau Patton adapted solar panels and a light-to-frequency converter to measure the sun’s rays on the Open Field, turning them into a beautiful arrangement of tunes in his “Composition for Photoelectric Array and Ambient Light Open Field.”

Whether teaching kids to break into cars, amplifying melons, generating songs through algorithms, reading poetry over the phone or pickling through lacto-fermentation, there was no shortage of inventive activities on hand at the Walker in July thanks to Machine Project. Always testing new ideas, hosting events and teaching classes at their Echo Park storefront, subscribe to their newsletter to keep on top of this industrious group’s latest happenings.

The Walker’s “Open Field” events continue through 4 September 2011, check the site for listings.

All images from Walker Open Field