The best solution to an architectural problem, argued the great architectural thinker Cedric Price (1934-2003), may not necessarily be a building. I mention Price because his spirit lurks somewhere behind the complex formerly known as Factory International, recently renamed Aviva Studios, a new £211m “landmark cultural space” that will be a home for the biennial Manchester international festival and a year-round facility. I also mention Price because this project is evidence that he might have been right.
His own designs (largely unbuilt, though he did co-author the beautiful aviary at London zoo) proposed flexible frameworks with moving parts that could be changed and reconfigured at will – mobile classrooms on railway wagons, for example. Similar ambitions motivate Aviva Studios, which, with the help of foldaway seating, retractable floors and huge sliding doors, is designed to host “any kind of setup”, as the official blurb puts it, “from intimate theatre shows and intricate exhibitions, to huge multimedia performances and warehouse-scale gigs”.
The building is not quite finished, and is not fully opening until October, but it has already been put to public use, hosting events for the recent edition of the festival. It comprises a vast, hangar-like space, 21 metres high, that has capacity for up to 5,000 people standing, and a 1,600-seat auditorium attached to one side. Called the Warehouse and the Hall, the two can be made to work together, such that the stage for the latter can run deep into the former, or separately. Conferences, awards dinners and fashion shows can be held here as well as concerts, and art installations at the scale of those in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The opening show inside the Warehouse is a fantasia of polka-dotted inflatables by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a pink-yellow-red array of creatures and vegetables blown up to the sizes of trucks and houses.
Early images of the designs, by the world-famous Rotterdam-based practice OMA (originally the Office for Metropolitan Architecture), showed a big box poised above a ground level opened up for freely moving crowds, with walls sliding away such that people might also flood down broad steps towards the bank of the River Irwell. The structure containing the auditorium also projected towards the water, a complex multifaceted shape covered in stretched fabric that looked light and fascinating. The project embodies a 1960s dream of flexible architecture, where buildings are equipment rather than objects, instruments for infinite delights, where gravity is abolished and barriers to movement removed.
The as-built version is different. The Warehouse and the Hall are in the same arrangement, reached through a broad foyer underneath, but something has happened to their free spirit. The Warehouse, no longer opening up to the outside, has become a functional box within, its exterior wrapped in glum concrete. The gossamer chrysalis of the Hall has calcified into angular metal sheets, gappy and misaligned.
The expansive ground plane has become a zone of deep porticos beneath a concrete ceiling, certainly accommodating of large crowds but too low ceilinged to feel good and too much like wind tunnels to work well in a Manchester climate. The generally industrial look might be considered some kind of tribute to the city’s manufacturing history, but the details lack the resolution of the robust old engineering structures. The Hall has a polyhedral corner whose unmatching metal planes seem to have taken one look at each other and then decided that it would be too much trouble actually to join up.
OMA’s architecture has never been about prettiness. It deals in clashes and inversions that at best are carried off with wit and energy and touches of sensuality and luxury – Ellen van Loon, the OMA partner in charge of Aviva Studios, achieved such things with the headquarters for Rothschild’s bank in London. You get glimmers here of what might be. The building is rammed into an old railway viaduct in a potentially interesting way. Its surroundings feature some intriguing overlappings of bridges and arches, which are echoed by the straddling composition of the new construction.
But zest and excitement have left the building. You get some OMA signatures, but they’ve lost their sense of purpose. Overhanging structures in red and yellow, lit a little like Broadway marquees, try to bring a bit of showbiz to the predominant concrete and steel. There are overhangs and cantilevers and a muscly red girder that goes nowhere. This is OMA by AI.
It’s likely that this end product is the result of a fraught process, even though the building has been generously endowed with political and financial support. In 2014, the then-chancellor George Osborne pledged £78m of taxpayer’s money towards it, to signify that a renewal programme known as the “northern powerhouse” had substance. Manchester city council also supported the project – then meant to cost £110m and to be completed in 2019. It was also seen as a key to unlocking property development on the land around it, on what was formerly the site of Granada TV’s studios.
Its budget, though, almost doubled, for reasons attributed to Covid, war in Ukraine and the building’s “unique design”. The city council increased its support, but also insisted on the sale of naming rights to raise money. Hence the change of name from one evocative of Andy Warhol and the local label Factory Records to one that smells of soul-selling and arm-twisting. Hence, too, the extensive cost-cutting evident in the flawed details.
“Factory International” at least lives on as the title of the organisation that runs the festival and operates Aviva Studios, but the new name speaks of a slightly desperate air of commercial exploitation that pervades the site. The slabs of flats and offices going up around the studios are as drab as can be, gridded assemblies of building components held together in space by contractual agreement. The festival’s recent events at the studios came with an installation of food outlets redolent of a Christmas fair, made up of plastic picket fences and wooden cabins. Despite zigzag decorations faintly reminiscent of OMA’s style, they consorted horribly with the latter’s building.
Behind these budgetary dramas lie some questions. Did the festival, which, as its organisers boast, thrived in spaces “from car parks to concert halls”, really need a lavish new venue by iconic architects? Are there many Yayoi Kusamas to fill its vast spaces? Was Osborne’s largesse – him being the same George Osborne whose austerity closed libraries – best spent on this, rather than less grandiose and more local projects? And was the nice-sounding idea of “flexibility”, which in practice multiplies the cost of construction, truly thought through? The answer to all, I’d suggest, is various shades of no.
So, I’m sorry. I’d love to love a cultural and urban project, publicly funded, designed by architects who have done some wonderful things, in a great British city. I may be jumping the gun a little – perhaps the Danny Boyle “spectacular”, with which the studios will officially open in the autumn, will confound the sceptics. But for now, I’m with Cedric Price. The best solution was not a building.
