Mann Island Photo Competition

• John Walker

  The Black Diamond National Library in Copenhagen is viewed very positively by the city’s inhabitants, and stunning inside, thus it gets much public use! Black marble and glass exterior seamless in design, built onto the back of the Royal Library.

  Mann Island (Death Star) does not have a seemless construction, with salt crystals and other debris amassing in grooves which runs down the building when wet leaving smears that will eventually stain, requiring much polishing… ahm. Other than Open Eye (or chain coffee shops) you canee go in it!!

• http://www.sevenstreets.com David Lloyd

  You’re right. I meant to say that ours was a derivative copy (and of the SF Jewish Museum too). Good point.

• John Walker

  SF Jewish Museum - that’s venturing into cloud territory!

• KT

  And The Liver Building looks like similar buildings in Chicago of the same era, and the Albert Dock looks like dock warehouses of a similar era worldwide..Do you want me to dig out those quotes by Charles Riley and J.A. Picton whining about the Liver and the Albert respectively when they were contemporary? I’ll admit, Mann Island doesn’t have the quality of the Copenhagen building, but produces a similar effect having seen both in the flesh. Most people don’t like it not becuase they are not quality though, but because they are modern and people dispise anything new, even though of course the buildings around them were once radically new, controversial and, in many ways deritative. Alsop’s plan would have probably been better, but all the cranks moaned and whined and moaned so what have you got, a fudge of a compromise. You were never going to please everyone and the Council should have had the balls to push the other plan through, it would all have been open a lot sooner too. At least it’s broken the back of having new buildings in the city, let’s build more. And better.

• http://www.sevenstreets.com David Lloyd

  Hey, we should have a beer and fight it out, man to man! (Mann?)

• andyohare

  maybe the problem with Mann Island is not that it’s poor quality, or that it’s derivative, but that it’s not actually *useful*. It serves no purpose. It was built purely speculatively to provide yet more residential and commercial space. It’s a manifestation of our crazy economic system

• http://www.sevenstreets.com David Lloyd

  Build it and they might come, but they probably won’t?

• http://www.spectralshutter.com David Gaynor

  In Great Britain, only London has a more recognisable waterfront than Liverpool. It is a fabulous place, and for that, Liverpudlians should be, and are, proud.
  However, I don’t think we can try to preserve areas in cities, as if we were dealing with museum exhibits.
  Cities are constantly evolving, and Liverpool should be no different. Modern architecture will always divide opinion, simply because it’s new, or maybe because it’s thought-provoking
  In Manchester, my city, and a place that I am wild about, we have the Urbis, and Libeskind’s effort on the Salford Docks site. Both were slagged off at the time of building, yet both are now talked up as examples of ‘out there’ architecture. Things move on, thankfully, and Liverpool has a lot to look forward to, if the waterfront developments in the pipeline come to fruition.
  I was recently in Cincinnati, and visited Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Arts Center. An earlier poster mentioned her as world class. She is. The building stands out from everything around it….and it looks sensational ( even in my photographs ! ). It’s been taken to heart by the locals, and you’ll struggle to meet a more conservative bunch than Cincinnatians.
  I’ve pictures of the Liver Building, taken since the new stuff went up. There’s no evidence of anything other than the line of stately buildings that include the Liver and the Cunard, proving that if the view is all, then all we have to do is move our feet a little.

— It looks wonderful but Anna Karenina is neither a stage play nor a straight period drama, and doesn’t quite work as either