(posted 7989 days ago)The Times
June 05, 2002How to explain war without glorifying it
By Simon TaitTHREE of the most offputting words in the English language are “imperial”, “war” and “museum”, said Alan Borg once when he was director-general of the museum in Kennington. “Imperial” is redolent of a former age; “war” evokes death or triumphalism; and a “museum” is a dull and static place with a negative public image.
None of those preconceptions, however, fits the Imperial War Museum’s newest manifestation, opening in Manchester on July 5, and designed by the unorthodox architect Daniel Libeskind.
Dr Borg and his successor at the Imperial War Museum, Robert Crawford, have made it their mission to change the perception of the name. Founded in 1920 to preserve the archaeology and archives of the 20th-century wars in which Britain or the Commonwealth have been involved, its emphasis has now shifted from what was first little more than a glorification of the Empire’s feats of arms to an objective analysis of conflicts from the points of view of individuals involved.
The praxis of using history to interpret modern wars has been extended to its branch museums, HMS Belfast near Tower Bridge, and the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall and at Duxford (the former USAF and RAF air station in Cambridgeshire). Now there is to be a further extension when the Imperial War Museum North opens on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal at Trafford Park.
The building itself is startling, the first to be built in this country by the deconstructivist architect who designed the controversial Jewish Museum that opened in Berlin in 1998, and the even-more-talked-about Spiral building planned to be a key part of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s ten-year development scheme.
“The title is a problem but it’s what we’re called and we have decided to live with it,” said the new museum’s director Jim Forrester. “We think that when people see the building and are drawn into the content, the name will be no more than that. This museum is about the social impact of war, it’s about the kind of people who will come here, who find themselves caught in conflicts.”
Cutting the Trafford Park skyline with slashing sweeps of gleaming aluminium, echoing the stainless steel Lowry Centre across the canal at Salford Quays, Libeskind’s lat- est museum is a series of crazy, angled walls and incomplete curves. The main entrance is in a tower where there might be all kinds of conventional welcomes, such as shops, leaflet dispensers, computer guides, but instead there is only a chilling void, the tower soaring above and scaffolding seeming to tumble down from the blackness above.
The architect has devised the building in a series of jagged structures so that shiny aluminium cuts through whitewashed walls, and floors curve almost imperceptibly as if the world itself has exploded.
The main exhibition hall takes visitors along a time-line of objects, photographs and film conflicts stretching from the Boer at the start of the last century to Afghanistan in the present.
Material is drawn from the biggest collection of eye-witness accounts of its kind in the world, as well as local archives — Trafford Park was a major industrial centre 60 years ago which the German High Command considered to be the bread basket of the economy, and it was heavily bombed. Among the quotations along the wall is one from the days leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War: “Close your hearts to pity, act brutally,” Adolf Hitler told his troops as they marched in August 1939.
The design of the main gallery was partly inspired by the strange and wonderful atmosphere of an underground cathedral in France, where a light show plays on the whitewashed walls.
Large objects include the kind of military material one might expect — a T34 Russian tank and an AV8a Harrier jump jet — but there is also a Trabant car from East Germany, produced in the postwar austerity that gripped communities behind the Iron Curtain, and a fire pump used in the Manchester Blitz.
On the hour, the lights go down for a 360-degree presentation from 60 projectors showing 1,900 images in ten minutes with sound archive recordings. Two programmes concentrate on children in war and why wars happen, and a third, “Weapons of War”, looks not just at the horrendous means of killing man has devised but at the people who manufactured and used them.
Alongside the main exhibition area are six “silos” — separate display areas which take particular aspects of 20th-century conflict, such as scientific development, women’s experiences and propaganda.
Visitors can also go to TimeStacks, storage retrieval systems from which themed trays with objects they can handle with the help of interpreters can be drawn.
“This museum is about education at all levels,” said Mr Forrester “but it’s also about emotion and what conflict does to each life it touches.”