February 4th, 2008
When you mention the name Liverpool to a non-Brit, they are likely to think of one of two things: Liverpool Football Club, whose worldwide brand power is second only to their Premiership rivals Manchester United, or The Beatles (indeed, mention the city’s name to a typical North American and they will likely only make a connection with the latter).
Liverpool, the perennial underdog of British cities and the butt of many jokes from Londoners, is this year’s European Capital of Culture — far from being just a city of football and youth gangs. Large-scale redevelopment projects carrying designs by such ‘Starchitects’ as Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli are flowering up all along its UNESCO World Heritage Site-designated waterfront. Liverpool is hoping that its cultural coronation by the EU will shake the image that many hold of the city — that of a rough-and-tumble, crumbling port town where the locals speak a perplexing dialect, Scouse, which can be best described as a cross between Gaelic and Swedish.
Today’s Liverpool is more akin to the boomtown of the 19th century, when the steamship lines and related merchant industries held great sway in the city. However, despite the attention that Liverpool has recently been receiving for its cultural and economic revitalization, the city will perhaps always be umbilically tied to the fab name of its most famous export.
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December 24th, 2007
What do you do with an abandoned building? Turn it into art. Such is the case in Liverpool where the British sculptor Richard Wilson has created Turning the Place Over, an ambitious intervention that removes an eight metre chunk of façade from a building in central Liverpool, rotates it and puts it back into place. An introduction to the piece by the Cass Sculpture Foundation describes it in more detail:
Turning the Place Over consists of an 8 metres diameter ovoid cut from the façade of a building and made to oscillate in three dimensions. The revolving façade rests on a specially designed giant rotator, usually used in the shipping and nuclear industries, and acts as a huge opening and closing ‘window’, offering recurrent glimpses of the interior during its constant cycle during daylight hours.
The ovoid section of facade is then mounted on a central spindle, aligned on a specific angle to the building. When at rest, the ovoid section of facade would fit flush into the rest of the building. The angled spindle is, however, placed on a set of powerful motorised industrial rollers and will rotate. As it rotates, the facade not only becomes completely inverted, but will also oscillate into the building and out into the street, revealing the interior of the building and only being flush with the building at one point during its rotation.
This astonishing feat of engineering will stun audiences on many levels. Disturbing and disorientating from a distance, from close-up passers-by have a thrilling experience as the building rotates above them.
Some observers have noted that Wilson’s intervention draws heavily from the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, an American architect and artist who carved up houses with a chainsaw in the 1970s. His work dwelled on the disintegration of the United States’ public life, including the decay of its cities; one of his more well-known efforts, very similar to Turning the Place Over, involved cutting out a large piece of wall from a New York warehouse and suspending it from a crane.
It’s not entirely clear what Wilson’s installation, which was commissioned by Liverpool in celebration of its designation as 2008′s European Capital of Culture, is trying to say. But it’s still remarkable, if only because it merges the public and private spheres of life into one, revealing the inner workings of a building that is normally shielded from passersby.
