Aviva Studios, Manchester

18 October 2023

Aviva Studios, Manchester

Whatever happened at the Factory? A ‘landmark new cultural space for Manchester and the world’ is a far cry from Factory Records

CHARISMA, LIKE pornography, is easier to recognise than define. Those who know Koolhaas agree on one thing: he has it. Most other things about him provoke disagreement. He has long been an agent provocateur in the world of architecture and planning. As for pornography, Koolhaas did once produce a script for the American soft-porn king Russ Meyer. But then, in 1975, together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp he founded OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, a firm that now has offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha and Australia. For a generation there has been a star system in architecture, as tacky and ludicrous and overblown as the Hollywood original Koolhaas might have once aspired to. But he really is a star. These days, he lectures everywhere and produces unwieldy philosophical books that are so cumbersome they are beloved by commentators and students alike. If they’re that bulky, they must be good. Architects dig through them looking for ideas; students all over the world wish to emulate him. The attraction lies, in part, in his ability to keep us off balance. In 1995, his book S,M,L,XL summarised the work of OMA as ‘a novel about architecture’. I doubt the firm’s latest project in Manchester will warrant a chapter should there ever be a new edition, but it is certainly novel. Controversial, Koolhaas delights in shaking up the establishment with that requisite air of the urbane along with a hint of melancholy that he tamps down while matching wits with bon mots delivered in any one of a handful of languages, a top-notch pitchman with a freaky sort of charisma and compelling salesmanship. He’s always good value, a first-rate firebrand in a world where architecture looks more and more like a form of corporate branding. But, as Norman Foster has been quoted as saying, architecture is too often treated as a fine art, ‘delicately wrapped in mumbo jumbo’, when in fact it incorporates disciplines including science, maths and engineering. There should not be a tension between beauty and functionality in architecture, yet there is.

Ellen van Loon is now one of eight partners that lead OMA. She joined in 1998. I have long admired her work in The Hague (the renovation and transformation of an old 90,000 sq m building for the Rijksvastgoedbedrijf), Rotterdam (a vertical city: three interconnected mixed-use towers accommodating offices, apartments, a hotel, conference facilities, shops, restaurants and cafes that is the largest building in the Netherlands), and in Doha (the Qatar National Library). They were sophisticated, precise in their execution and they won awards. She is currently working on KaDeWe in Berlin (the great historic department store), the Palais de Justice de Lille and Les Galets, a new development in Montpellier, following on from her involvement in MEETT, the new and monumental 195,000 sq m Exhibition and Convention Centre in Toulouse where she led the project with Chris van Duijn and Rem Koolhaas. She won the EU Mies van der Rohe Award in 2005. She’s very good.

A solid disappointment, OMA’s latest project comes across as an Instagram concept gone wrong. Image Credit: Chlebik

In November 2015, beating a high-profile shortlist, which included Zaha Hadid and Rafael Viñoly, the OMA team led by Ellen won a competition for a new cultural venue in Manchester. High profile, it could not have been higher, located at the heart of Spinningfields, an old neighbourhood on the banks of the Irwell that is being redeveloped by Allied London in partnership with the city council, this would surely really be something. They have renamed the area St John’s. There was even an Alexander Calder sculpture in Chicago shown on pages 119 and 138 of the developer’s brochure. It is still there, but it is not coming to Manchester. But then we can all dream.

International award-winning photographer Jan Chlebik who has featured around the world on the BBC and international media for his outstanding photography, has taken some pictures for FX that capture the essence of The Factory and its legacy. Image Credit: Chlebik

Every time there is a new OMA building to consider, most of us do the design equivalent of what Martin Amis said – ‘the reader leans forward’. Previously in this country, OMA’s residential towers at the former Commonwealth Institute may well have destroyed a precious example of modern landscaping, and before that there was PMA/Progress, an exhibition at the Barbican in 2012. So? Starchitect retrospectives are a mainstay of museum programming, much like their close cousins in the art world. Much like Foster at the Pompidou this year, they are the junk food of architecture, exhibitions that are not really exhibitions of architecture at all: drawings behind glass, aerial photographs, models like sculptures, traces of work to be admired in isolation to their built reality, severed from context. But that show a decade ago whetted the architectural appetite. So here we are, an event long hoped for but scarcely expected, a major arts building in the UK by OMA.

How does an award-winning multi-talented design team, one fêted, eulogised and courted across the world, go from winning a design competition with an exciting piece of work to delivering a box? And a box at that which is unlikely to produce anything more than a yawn, a look-a-like NASA lunar module that has pitched up beside the river, or rather some alien spaceship run up on the cheap by a local television studio, and dropped into this English Manhattan by Stanley Kubrick out of Wernher von Braun, in what will supposedly be a radiant city of the future, an alchemy of computergenerated wonder, a UFO making landfall by the Irwell. A crash landing without any sense of context or locality, a photogenic Instagram concept.

This is a significant project for both the firm and the city of Manchester. Was it just a vanity project for one and all? Tony Wilson must be turning in his grave. Wilson, the Granada Television reporter who started Factory Records and the Haçienda club, would not be looking back to the 1990s in naming a new arts venue. The man who has ‘Cultural Catalyst’ engraved on his headstone would be looking forwards as he always did. Criticised by some as ‘art washing’, those behind the project believe the name provides an appropriate nod back to the city’s musical heritage of the 1980s. Four years late and with its cost up from a projected £110m, then to £186m, and now over £210m, city leaders believe the 13,000 sq m of Factory International will add £1bn to the local economy, draw 850,000 visitors a year and create or support up to 1,500 new jobs.

But what about the building? Well, we all make mistakes, it’s their scale that matters. The question is whether the new architecture (they call it transparent and acoustically sound) is any more than a shed? I’m not a gambler, but to me it looks like the second-best-looking man in an old Ealing Comedies film. A sad joke.

This is a long way from club nights at Factory, from late 1970s punk gigs on the dystopian Hulme Estate and its legacy of a subversive avant-garde spirit. It has become official culture funded by big business and government, the flip-side of a city famed for home-grown culture. At the end of June, Factory International was renamed Aviva Studios following the insurance company acquiring naming rights for £35m, and the latest overrun of costs to be settled, the money going in part toward repaying council borrowing. But then, it wasn’t renamed. Just to complicate matters, in a confusion of identity, Aviva Studios is now the home of Factory International, ‘a landmark new cultural space for Manchester and the world’, as the blurb has it. Whatever it is, it occupies a site next to the world’s first railway station, Liverpool Road Manchester. Rising up from the banks of the Irwell in the former Victorian cotton metropolis, a striking diamond-shaped landmark was intended to become a symbol of the city’s 21st century resurgence. The original proposal was radical and exciting. Supposedly embracing Manchester’s industrial as well as its creative past, its concrete and corrugated metal facades standing against the refurbished brick warehouses and new build flats, offices and television studios that make up the new St John’s neighbourhood. The main space is ‘The Warehouse’, a par for the course, open, industrial, adaptable, multi-use shed that nods back to the Pineapple Line viaduct with its old arches incorporated into the foyer. This links to a 1,600-seat auditorium, ‘The Hall’, slated for use with opera, ballet, and more conventional theatre.

In January 2017 the project got the green light as planning approval was granted. Come May 2018, the designs had been reworked, including significant revisions to the main theatre with its exterior completely remodelled, both north and south elevations of the warehouse element were ‘modified to reflect the developed structural design, and to take in account the future use of the interior space’, with much of the glazing now removed, there were ‘fewer penetrations to the listed fabric’. The budget had been increased, and a further set of designs unveiled in September 2020. In September 2022, the opening date and programme were announced and the press went a little overboard in its universal acclaim. ‘Move over London – there’s never been a better time for culture in the north,’ said The Times; ‘New Manchester arts venue shines light on city’s resurgence,’ was FT’s take on it; and, five years late, The Telegraph hailed how ‘Everything turns inside out and upside down’, and stage designer Es Devlin was quoted as saying: ‘Imagine if you took the Royal Festival Hall auditorium and trucked it along the Thames to the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, then just rammed it up to the wall.’ Well, well.

The project is a crash landing without any sense of context or locality. Image Credit: Pawel Paniczko

A spectacular range of architectural styles makes Manchester’s skyline a sight to behold. A product of the industrial revolution, and noted for its warehouses, cotton mills, viaducts and canals, it is clear that this was a city that produced and traded goods on a grand scale. Modern, contemporary, Georgian, Roman and Gothic, Manchester’s buildings have it all. Will this new addition warrant a footnote when its architectural history is rewritten? A fitting match for MediaCityUK, it may confirm cynical suspicions that ‘architecture’ is only a specialised branch of shopping. The visionaries that gave us John Rylands Library, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester Town Hall, the Free Trade Hall and Bridgewater Hall will be turning in their graves alongside Tony Wilson. So it goes. But the project has been branded. Should we be surprised? And that is certainly nothing special either, despite the fact that we are told from 2015 none less than Peter Saville was involved. Encompassing ‘original and modern’ was how Saville put it, the city as brand was at the heart of what he wanted to do to attract the punters. I leave that one to you, dear reader.

The project deserved better all round. This is not a building to be compared to OMA’s Performing Arts Centre in Taipei, or even the Fondazione Prada in Milan. It is ambitious, certainly, but it is not that big, and certainly not that grand. Will it shine a light on the city’s reawakening? Van Loon hails from Rotterdam, a city of ships and boats and trains; she understands industrial heritage, but has she understood or even appreciated Manchester?

And the next competition entry? Starchitecture? There are projects that, as in Manchester, draw you in, that will always have the potential to excite. They don’t fall off a tree and firms have to compete for them. You have a choice: You can compete or not. But you do need the work to keep those 500 people gainfully employed, and you need the money to pay them all. The idea that you suddenly get a Pritzker Prize – as Koolhaas did in 2000 – does not mean that the floodgates automatically open: anything and everything does not simply drop into your lap. That is a myth. Does winning the Pritzker helps? Well, you’re on the list. You’re always on the list. So you enter all those high profile competitions for arts centres: Moscow, Beijing, anywhere. Even Manchester.

You might think you’ve had enough OMA, but you soon want more. But, from time to time, there are details that seem to conjure nothing but an exhausted imagination. Usually the firm is nothing if not always buzzing. Everything they do is worth examining. That is what makes the project in Manchester so sad. One hopes this is not the start of a decline of the great firm. At least, it probably marks the back half of OMA’s Koolhaas era. As Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to The Portrait of Dorian Gray in 1890: ‘When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.’ Koolhaas relishes controversy – he would probably invite competitive disparagement as an appropriate register of admiration.

Then again, fame means never having to say you’re sorry.