When Tate Liverpool opened in the Albert Dock in 1988 it became the UK’s first national museum of modern art. It was also the first major public museum to open in a restored industrial building, and would become a model for the reinvention of urban docks worldwide as a cultural asset. The Guggenheim Bilbao, so often used as a marker for regeneration through art, would not open for almost another decade, and London’s Tate Modern would not follow until 2000.
It is a wonderful and very strange site. Liverpool’s docks were opened in 1846, the most advanced in the world: the first to be fire-resistant and timber-free, constructed of iron, stone and brick. They are also astoundingly beautiful. In our era of tin sheds and generic distribution centres on anonymous motorway edgelands, it is hard to comprehend the effort and workmanship that went into these industrial structures.
The architect of Tate Liverpool, James Stirling, compared the Albert Dock to an Italian piazza, but one filled with water rather than people. The dock is simultaneously one of the UK’s grandest public spaces and its most inaccessible. The central space is filled with brackish water and its architecture, meant to protect valuable cargoes of silk, spirits, ivory, tea and tobacco, was intended to be secure and to appear that way. From the outside it is an imposing building, but not a welcoming one.
That is partly what a new redesign aims to address. As part of the Waterfront Transformation Project, spearheaded by National Museums Liverpool, architects 6a are remodelling the galleries and attempting to open this austere mass of industrial heritage into something more inviting and accessible. 6a have form with historic buildings and cultural institutions, from the South London Gallery (converted from a Peckham fire station) and Raven Row (a gallery in an early 18th-century Spitalfields house) to CARA, in a playing card factory in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. They have revitalised larger public institutions, too — notably the remarkable MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, 40 miles north of London.
But in Liverpool their work is circumscribed by this fiercely solid edifice in the UK’s largest complex of Grade I listed buildings, and reimagining the work of one of Britain’s most revered architects. James Stirling, who was responsible for rethinking the museum in the 1980s, also designed Stuttgart’s postmodern masterpiece, the Staatsgalerie, and the Clore Gallery at London’s Tate Britain.
The architects are working with a densely compacted mesh of layers. There is the history of the city and its global connections; the rethinking of industrial archaeology as a space for culture; the layers of architectural intervention, from neoclassical imperial origins through to postmodernism. They must balance contemporary concerns about regeneration, place and the confronting of difficult histories.
6a co-founder Stephanie Macdonald succinctly describes the plans as “flinging the windows open”. “At its heart this is a project about reconnecting the museum with Liverpool,” she says, as the water sparkles behind us, “with the Mersey and the world that arrived through it.”
Since Stirling designed the first iteration of the museum, Liverpool has changed. This is now a cultural quarter, kick-started by the arrival of Tate. But culture itself since then has reconnected with the world. The concerns of contemporary art and its curators today are concentrated far more on the complex entanglements of history, place, capital and commerce.
“Liverpool was the city through which the world arrived into Britain,” Macdonald says. And this new design aims to make those connections tangible. What were once windowless galleries, corridors and stairways will be opened up to the water, the building becoming as much about the city as it is about art. The silvery expanse of the River Mersey still shimmers outside but 6a’s reimagining of the building will make it more visible and present from the interior.
Their plans include a new “art hall” — a double-height, ground-floor space with rippling shallow ceiling vaults stripped back to the raw brick — which will accommodate works much larger than they currently can. The ground floor is being opened up with glazing (to replace Stirling’s bright blue panels and porthole windows) to enable an awareness of the art from outside.
“It sounds ridiculous”, says Macdonald, “but many people who visit here don’t even know there’s an art museum inside.” Certainly from the riverside walk this is an impenetrable complex. The high brick walls designed to visually and physically deter, still do their job well. Opening up the facades a little will give a hint of publicness, glimpses of stairs and people, art and events, a warm glow of light.
This is intended to be a low-key reimagining, maintaining as much of the power of the original buildings — designed by Jesse Hartley, a civil engineer thought to be the world’s first dedicated designer of docks — but also Stirling’s interventions: the layer that relaunched this neighbourhood as a cultural destination. There is no need for a new icon here. The Albert Dock, with its squat, red columns, arches, and the industrial archaeology of its remaining cranes and winches, is as elegant and urbane a set-piece as you could imagine.
Tate Liverpool is only one component in a much larger ecosystem of historical reckoning. Liverpool’s grandeur was a consequence of the vast wealth generated by imperial trade, but that history is inextricably knotted into a legacy of colonisation, exploitation and slavery.
A new building beside the Merseyside Maritime Museum was granted planning permission earlier this month and is designed to give visibility to the rather understated International Slavery Museum. Perhaps surprisingly, in light of the radical shift in the gaze of the cultural world towards historical atrocities, it is the UK’s only such institution. Architects Feilden Clegg Bradley have proposed a £58mn revamp, most visibly a looming new porch — a dark, crypt-like entrance that suggests descent but actually involves an ascent to the galleries, placed beside the classical temple frontage of the old docks building in which the museum sits.
Just across the water at Canning Graving Docks, Asif Khan Studio and Chicago artist Theaster Gates have designed a permanent pavilion that aims to make the darker side of this history more present. Work has begun on a major restoration of the docks where once slave ships were scraped, tarred and painted (“graved”). A striking new truncated pyramid will emerge from the depths as a “centre for contemplation”. The whole site will, we might hope, slowly become a landscape of reconciliation, a contrast to the more accustomed model of regeneration driven by commerce and consumption.
Bringing the museum’s systems up to date is proving costly and money is tight. The installation of new water-source heat-pumps — immersed in the docks to ensure a more sustainable future for the museum — is admirable and necessary but expensive. So far Tate has raised more than 72 per cent of the total project costs and fundraising is ongoing. But this is now the UK’s most important cultural project, a pioneering museum in a pioneering regeneration of a once-neglected city.
The docks closed more than half a century ago, but now they are more full of people than ever. As Tate Liverpool director Helen Legg puts it: “We need to think of ourselves again as a world city, because that is what Liverpool is”. And this is a project about the world as much as about Liverpool.
tate.org.uk/visit/tate-liverpool
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