Monday, March 2, 2009

The New Museum of Liverpool

This new project will seek to build on the success of the old museum which, with limited floor space, could no longer deal with the more than 300,000 annual visits and will be able to better represent the history of the city of Liverpool and can place it within a wider British urban context.

The 72 million pound museum set to open in 2010, is located on the Mann Island site at the Pier Head, at the core of the World Heritage Site on Liverpool's famous waterfront and will be the world's first national museum devoted to the history of a regional city as it reflects Liverpool's global significance through its unique geography, history and culture.

With a total square footage of about 24,000, the museum will be composed of four large gallery spaces, an 180 seat theater for audio/visual and community theater performance, facilities for after-hours events, meetings, after-school clubs and dining in the brasserie. The new building will display 6,000 new exhibits not displayed in the previous building with other interesting additions including a tailor-made gallery for children under six called Little Liverpool and a "history detectives" gallery which charts Liverpool's story from the last ice age to today.

The general goal is to allow the exhibits be capable of incorporating change, to examine and interpret the city as it evolves. Within the new museum there will be ‘anchor’ elements of the displays outlining the milestones of Liverpool’s development, combined with more frequently changing temporary exhibition spaces. This combination of approaches and media will realize the museum’s core value as an engine of learning through a mixture of education and entertainment.

What is most impressive with this project is that despite the economy, the city of Liverpool didn't use this as an excuse to submit a cabinet full of "work change orders" and greatly reduce the scope of the project. They saw this as an opportunity to not only create a landmark building for the city but to also improve their economy. The building will attract more than 750,000 visitors per year including 100,000 learning visits, provide at least 500 construction jobs and 73 direct permanent jobs.




Images obtained from: www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
For more information, check: www.designbuild-network.com/projects/museum-liv/

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I say who cares? Arch, you seem to have way too much stuff on the uk and not much on the United States! Where are you from anyways? To hell with what the english are doing!

ArchSourcer said...

I do have more articles on projects in the United States. If you look through my past posts, you'd see that. I try to write on issues all over the world regardless of the region so I don't think saying that I tend to favor the UK is very accurate.
Give them their due credit for coming up with many innovative solutions in science and building construction. It isn't my fault we really aren't up to par here in the States any more so calm down.
Oh, and I'm from the Bay Area, California. I'm not British!