Four years behind schedule and £100million more than expected, the construction of Manchester’s Factory International has not gone to plan, but its smooth opening on June 30 is still highly anticipated. The site, once reputed to be the cradle of modern industry, seems to do residential investment much better than culture. Again International Factory is undeniably taking shape: a big, clunky blockbuster of a building to give the Manchester International Festival (MIF) a purpose-built home. And, surely, all the best buildings go a little over budget?
The £211million Factory International, the biggest public investment in a UK cultural project since the Tate Modern opened in 2000, is aimed at that modernist dream of a multipurpose cultural venue, somewhere between concert hall, concert hall, festival, theater and art space. It is a hybrid imagined for a long time and rarely successful. But maybe OMA architects, founded by Rem Koolhaas in London in 1975, can pull it off. The extraordinary of OMA Taipei Performing Arts Centerwhich opened last year (seven years late, 100% budget overrun), has met with enormous success: a truly popular, radical, open, accessible and frequented place.
Most of the attention on Factory International (apart from its bloated budget) has focused on its performance possibilities: for music, dance and theater. There’s perhaps a little less emphasis on the visual arts, though the opening event in June will be Yayoi Kusama’s largest immersive environment yet, a piece designed specifically with the building’s vast spaces in mind. You, me and the balloons opens June 30 (until August 28) and is billed as a “journey through Kusama’s psychedelic creations – many of which are over 10m tall – including giant dolls, dramatic twisting landscapes and a vast constellation of dotted spheres”.
Although Kusama’s work is hugely overexposed – it’s hard to go to a museum or a high-end shopping street without meeting her – she remains genuinely popular, and her work is hugely appealing to those who post on social media.
Factory International will operate as a multi-purpose cultural venue and will include a 1,600-seat capacity auditorium and a main space that can be subdivided AMO
Designed as a home for the hugely successful and admired Manchester International Festival, Factory International was to accommodate almost every art medium imaginable, in what sounds like a tricky file for any architect. “Not at all; in fact, it was our dream,” says its designer, Ellen van Loon of OMA. “It was very short – an A4 sheet – but the client was asking for exactly what we had always dreamed of building It was a match made in heaven.
“The user here is special,” Van Loon says of the MIF. “They create and launch new projects all the time and often in combinations that no one would have ever thought of, like opera and hip-hop. So you can only design this way, the way we like, without limits.
John McGrath, Artistic Director of MIF, says the building is “designed to replicate the kind of architectural excitement we’ve had at sites like the [former railway yard] Mayfield Depotbut in an environment that has a much greater technical capacity.
“It maximizes choices for artists,” says McGrath. “For example, our main warehouse has a full theatrical grid over its 64m by 34m, so artists can place their work and audiences anywhere in the space. We tried to design a space that allows artists to think differently about how work can be shaped and structured.
Dream of flexibility
Is there, however, a pride associated with this dream of flexibility? Can you end up with a building like jack-of-all-trades but master of none? “Cultural buildings are quite expensive,” says Van Loon. “It’s not the only one that has gone over budget, and if so much public money is being spent, you have a responsibility to use it to the fullest.”
“Artists in general work in a wide range of media,” McGrath points out. “Our space doesn’t ask them to decide in advance which area of their practice they want to focus on, like a gallery or a theater space does. It invites them to start with a proposition and an idea, or a question, and explore what form will work best for that idea. »
The building is a curious thing. (Van Loon quotes me my own description as “surprisingly unpleasant” with a hoarse, self-critical laugh.) The pursuit of beauty has never been OMA’s pursuit, though this rather lumpy structure seems radical in its aesthetic, even for them. .
Situated between the River Irwell, an old railway line, a few remaining Victorian warehouses and a growing mass of developer housing blocks in the city’s branded St John’s area, Factory International looks like an element of architectural nominative determinism. McGrath says he was inspired by Manchester’s “messy skyline and cityscape, where styles clash in unexpected, and often productive, ways”.
Van Loon says she “wanted to keep the industrial feeling of this part of Manchester – not just the brick warehouses, but the more modern buildings, industrial sheds and large boxes seemingly built without any architectural thought”.
Certainly the sheer scale of the building suggests a hangar or assembly plant for something big. There is a 1,600-seat auditorium – The Hall – but the main space, The Warehouse, is a colossal concrete room with movable partitions allowing it to be subdivided if necessary. The interior incorporates part of the early 19th century railway viaduct, embracing the area’s history in its fabric. But its absorption of local history goes much further, right down to its very name. “We were very aware of that history, of the label, of the Haçienda, of the music that I grew up with, like Joy Division,” McGrath explains.
Tribute to the Haçienda
In a nod to this heritage, Ben Kelly, the designer of the original Haçienda club in 1982, which was built in the language of building sites and industrial spaces, was commissioned to design some of Factory International’s interiors. Peter Saville, one of the founders of Factory Records and the man who gave its covers their distinctive identity, also helped create the building’s graphics.
But how could it really work as an art space? A huge Kusama installation is kind of spectacular, but what else is there? “I didn’t want it to be another Turbine Hall: a space with a big installation in the middle,” says Van Loon, referring to the huge industrial volume of the Tate Modern. “Instead, we wanted a space where you can experience a work of art in the making, where things are created in front of you and around you. Art has become so precious that it hides in vaults or behind glass, almost in laboratory conditions. We wanted something where you could reach out and touch it: a factory for art.”
The design of the building changed from something more transparent, almost tent-like, like objects in a pair of white tights, to something more rugged and angular. “That’s because it’s an increasingly residential area,” says van Loon. “It’s all about soundproofing, so that events can last 24 hours without the residents complaining.
There was another Dutch designer, Constant Nieuwenhuys, whose most famous work, New Babylon, was a conceptual, post-industrial complex in which the pursuit of leisure was everything. In his thought, an infinitely reconfigurable landscape provides a framework for this new urbanity. Nieuwenhuys was a Situationist, and it was this movement that so influenced Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records, in his conception of Manchester as a new cultural landscape. Even the name of the Haçienda was taken from a text by a Situationist, Ivan Shtcheglov.
The Haçienda was demolished and replaced by a building of the same name. Popular culture consumed by commerce. Factory International’s job will be to resist such a thing, to maintain its presence. It looks pretty tough.
