A month or so in to the Urbis museum's life and opinions are beginning to mix. Probably quite rightly.
The New York Times says:
"The war museum has one major advantage over Urbis: the planners knew what to put in the building. Much like the ill-fated Millennium Dome in London, Urbis appears to have begun as a $45 million urban and architectural project, with events organizers rather than curators left to define its contents. The result, a so-called urban experience built around audio-visual snippets of major cities, is an interactive show that fails to engage the visitor."
NY Times: War Museum Opens in Manchester [requires registration, free]
Some truth in that, but Deyan Sudjic in The Observer sticks the boot in rather harder. And there's a lot of truth in what he says - a lot of the exhibits are not particularly imaginitive. However, Sudjic should also know how difficult it is to produce these kind of projects in the UK. This isn't France, Japan, or the USA, where exhibitions and exhibits like this would be produced properly. I guess the people Sudjic points the finger at 'could've done a Stephen Bayley' and left (as Bayley did from the Dome debacle). And yet they didn't - they decided to stay on and scrap. Sudjic could be a little more aware of the context of this kind of work in this country, where uninformed clients, and contractors looking to cut corners, make it extremely difficult to produce anything of any value in this field (I'm leaving out the whole 'UK has a love-hate relationship with serious culture but generally hate' argument). The fact that part of Urbis suceeds at all is down to the people Sudjic rails against. He's missed the target altogether, and only those that worked on it will really know (the real culprits are hardly likely to step forward and put the record straight).
Yes, it's a shame that the UK makes it near-impossible to produce good exhibitions, but it's not for want of trying here. Makes you wonder if Sudjic has a hidden agenda (or maybe London media has an agenda against a Manchester very much on the up at the moment?).
And, yes, whole parts of Urbis are less-than satisfying to the seasoned and experienced urban culture-ite (as I've noted previously), but it is for 'all the family'. That doesn't excuse some lowest-common denominator thinking, which Urbis certainly has on occasion, as well as some dubious so-called interactive exhibits (the Pompidou was full of families & punters all ages at the weekend, as is the British Museum for that matter, despite its old-fashioned approach and current problems). And yes, the building could've interfaced with the exhibits better. However, UK-based journalists can hardly claim the intellectual high ground here (or indeed anywhere else), and I urge you to go and make your own mind up.
The Observer: Where William Morris meets Mills & Boon... and loses
[Jonathan Glancey wrote a rather more balanced piece in The Observer's 'parent paper' The Guardian, noting that the exhibition/museum should be a place of change if anything, and if certain aspects aren't right now, they can change, grow, develop. As a city does.]
Now the good news. Blueprint magazine's review of the Imagining section I worked on, in an interview with Peter Higgins, director at Land Design, who produced the actual exhibit:
"In both a technological and curatorial sense, the most impressive of Land's exhibits at Urbis is Imagining. This constantly moving stream of city-related images contains introductory peices on 128 individuals whose file can be stopped and accessed by a wave of your hand. Further hand waves over an electromagnetic filed enable the visitor to progress through layers of information on the likes of Ridley Scott, Fritz Lang, Virginia Woolf, Mondrian and Baron Hausmann, all of whom contributed to the idea of city living. Your selections are montaged on a screen above your head, an urbanesque graphic where Mondrian's New York Boogie Woogie or text from Patrick Suskind's Perfume morph into a mutating cityscape - what designer Lol Sargent calls a 'controlled cacophony'. This inadvertent image-making is a useful metaphor for place-making, a demonstration of how people's actions and interests manifest themselves in the fabric of their surroundings; but the exhibit is supposed to have a more direct effect. Higgins relishes the thought that visitors might be provoked into engaging more fully with the world of objects and ideas by actually buying a book, watching a film or even getting on a plane. "The museum experience is not necessarily about learning, it's about being inspired. We understand that in 90 minutes or two hours at Urbis you will not leave as an expert on cities, city-living or town-planning, but what you will do is come away saying 'I'm going to read Ulysses', or even 'I'm going to Sao Paulo'," says Higgins. "The substance of this project - the material objects - are in fact real people and real places."
Blueprint, no.196, June 2002
Shame there isn't a shop, stocking the objects experienced in the display and more, which I'd urged them to consider early on. Nothing doing.
The plot thickens!
