War stories: Daniel Libeskind's trophy building for the imperial War Museum is a key element in the regeneration of Salford's defunct docks.

Salford Quays, Manchester is a former dockland recently redeveloped with housing and commerce. There are two cultural cherries on this cake: Michael Wilford's theatre and gallery complex, The Lowry (AR August 2000), and Libeskind's War Museum across the canal. Both are intentional landmark buildings, extrovert in the extreme, and they cooperate to raise the architectural temperature well above the local norm of awful shopping palaces, meaninglessly symmetrical PoMo bronzed glass offices and low-grade vernacular/Georgian housing.

Given the need to grab attention, Libeskind has produced the more successful sculptural piece. Simpler in its basic form than the cacophonous Lowry and more muted in colour, it is more coherent as an object despite its dynamic plan; yet its curves and diagonals differentiate it dramatically from the horizontal and vertical backdrop of ordinary buildings. From a distance the tower makes a projecting sail, but as you approach, the building becomes a collision of large rounded metallic forms. Its front yard is criss-crossed with dynamic Libeskind lines infilled with contrasting materials and concrete pyramids which evoke tank-traps. The widest of the magic lines is a concrete path leading unambiguously towards the entrance at the base of the tower. This is a surprise: not a tower of rooms but a soaring empty frame, one of the few places you see the structure. Take a lift in the corner and walkway across the top, and you are rewarded with a panorama of Manchester through a grille, the only view allowed, and not from the tower's highest point. War may be a cage, but the grille reads as an anti-suicide measure: tiny hinged openings leave only cameras an unfettered view. Back on the ground, an unexpectedly sharp right turn brings entrance queue and information desk. Left and right again through the shop, zigzag up stairs in near darkness to reach entrances to exhibi tion rooms. All is basement gloom, for the building is blind apart from windows in the restaurant. It is therefore hard to relate inside to outside.

The main exhibition sequence presents itself initially as a labyrinth of unknown length and unknown depth, rather like a cave. In a brilliant move, some sense of orientation is restored by setting the floor on a gentle slope, so you feel yourself descend as it sinks towards the far corner and rise as it returns. Libeskind gave the exhibition designers a long angular space lit by randomly diagonal gashes of fluorescents. With his approval, they added angular islands to produce more concentrated pockets for specialized exhibition areas. The designers also projected diagonal bands of light onto the new walls, and clashing diagonals remain the dominant visual impression.

The exhibition takes four forms. First there is a handful of large objects including a jump-jet, a tank, a field gun, a fire trailer -- and oddly a Trabant car. (1) Second, there are conventional glass cases with things like documents, photographs, military uniforms, gas masks, and artificial limbs. These are accompanied by the usual labels and texts, taking up themes such as Empire, Commonwealth and War, Women and War, and Science, Technology and War. Third, there are small exhibition enclaves like the 'silos' made of filing cabinets, and the room done out like a Lichtenstein painting. Finally, there is a periodic son et lumiere display involving great batteries of slide-projectors showing the extensive collection of war photographs, which you experience throughout the space as you wander around. In short, all stops are pulled to give you the maximum 'experience', and the paucity of large objects is counterbalanced by the audio-visuals. Beside the main gallery is another for temporary exhibitions, at presen t showing a slide show on the construction of the building. The small restaurant is sited between the galleries off the main stair. It has a well-placed zigzag serving counter, black Libeskind tables, and the only glimpse of the outside world through its horizontal tinted window. The shop is on the way out, with swinging display cases that become doors and more zigzag gashes of light in the ceiling. Sales have already exceeded 25 per cent of the predicted annual turnover.

Dave Haslam's comment in a recent BBC documentary that the title Imperial War Museum 'combines three of my least-favourite words' is symptomatic of an uneasiness hard to dispel. (2) The armed services need their pride and their rituals and we ought to preserve for posterity an archive of military objects, but it is increasingly difficult to believe in just and honourable wars. The First World War is now seen as an act of general carnage caused by excessive nationalism, and the myth of the Second as a good clean fight, so powerfully portrayed in British and American films of the 1950s, is increasingly undermined by revelation of mistakes and atrocities as historians sift the evidence. Also in our world-village you cannot celebrate victories without offending the loser (who often as not stands next to you) and we have more appropriate times and places to commemorate the dead. True, there has been a shift away from displays of military pride and weapon-fetishism. The curators at Manchester have tried instead to situate war within its social and historical context, not shirking from exposing its horrors and waste. But even so, the lights and glamour of presentation, the feeling of entering the set of a TV show, lend the weapons and hardware a touch of James Bond. It is hard to escape the impression of thrills and entertainment as the essence of what we now tellingly call a 'visitor attraction'. A disenchanted German critic went further, referring to 'an outlet-store for military history, an art gallery of the destruction-aesthetic'. (3)

It may be unfair to single out the War Museum for criticism that can be applied to most museums today, but it does seem to push the issue and provide a moral hostage. With every branch of human endeavour regarded as a business and therefore tarnished by money, is not each curator beholden to the graph of visitor numbers? And does this not lead to a certain desperation to outdo the last one, make something flashier, more spectacular, workable on an even shorter attention span? In the case of a subject like war, deadpan presentation might be safer, and the model of the archive more appropriate. The old planes as they used to be shown simply lined up in an old hangar at Duxford with simple notices might be enough. Make of them what you will. It is ironic that in this so-called post-modern age, when everything supposedly depends on the stance and interpretation of the viewer, we are increasingly served everything pre-digested on a plate. The idea of the new capitalist 'democracy', that we vote with our purses, do es not apply with the War Museum: admission is free, or to put it another way, we already paid for it. Like it or not, the building is a national cultural institution, a record of who we are and what we have been, a generator and guardian of shared mythology. It must surely therefore be something and mean something more than another afternoon's entertainment, another film on the box.

The museum's context also demands scrutiny, for its position as figurehead in Manchester's urban redevelopment can be no mere innocent coincidence. The architecture offers a signature, and the sail-like profile of the tower is used as the museum's logo. (4) Ever since Gehry's Guggenheim at Bilbao (AR December 1997), city fathers have looked hopefully on cultural buildings as catalysts for regeneration, whether as an injection of high-culture to leaven the commercial mix, or more bluntly as devices to suck people in and make the tills ring faster. When in the 1960s or '70s you saw a single wacky irregular building in a sea of boring boxy ones, it was a church: Ronchamp set the paradigm. Nowadays it is instead a museum, but it carries some of the same spiritual expectations. Culture legitimates the city and creates spin-offs: not only is money spent in the War Museum and Lowry: a commercial building across the way is opportunistically presented as a Design Centre.

With the pressure for fresh images, museum buildings have become playgrounds for architects. International reputations are made with bids for sheer spectacle, and the authors become the Calvin Kleins of building. They set the scene, students imitate them, and their theories are taken seriously. But the Midas touch of the 'great architect' is in danger of blinding us to the limitations, moral difficulties and compromises surrounding the commission. Instead, look at the developing story. After wading around in difficult seas of theory and producing some charming and intriguing drawings, Daniel Libeskind made his name with the Jewish Museum in Berlin (AR April 1999).

But having invented and proved his style, Libeskind has gone on to re-apply it elsewhere, and few could fail to notice that the same family of forms and techniques dominate the Jewish Museum, the War Museum, and the planned 'spiral' extension for the V&A. The difficult question is whether this vocabulary can really be equally appropriate each time, for there is a danger that the unique nature of the Jewish Museum will be diluted. Libeskind gives different explanations. He is a great talker, a charming and incurable optimist, and everything is grist to his mill. Countless alibis prop up the work, some of which defy comprehension. But that for the War Museum is simple enough. It is meant to be a shattered globe. The building form takes three pieces from the same hollow sphere. These are called 'shards' and related to the elements earth, water and air--the 'fire' shard so appropriate to war is unaccountably missing. The air shard points up as the tower, the earth shard comes out of the ground; the water shard p oints towards the canal. The symbolism is that war shatters the globe: that's it.

He explained it as a distorted six-pointed star and as a collision of lines which linked remembered local places of Jewish significance, but these arcane 'meanings' are only readable with prior knowledge and guidance. Obvious to everybody, in contrast, is a kind of anti-architecture of clashing lines, with almost nothing straight and square, slashe s and cuts, sharp corners, zigzags. The contrast with newly re-gridded Berlin and the Rationalism of the leading local architects could scarcely be starker. Libeskind has come to be regarded as the leader of the other' tradition in Berlin, that of outsiders, of protest, of wildness and irregularity. For an architect moving from theory to practice, it has to be said that he made the transition into the world of building with surprising panache. He capitalized on the new technical freedom brought by computers to build irregularly, and he has shown an instinctive feel for enhancing his formal ideas through an effective choice of materials, and forgetting around difficult corners without embarrassment. The building was considered so impressive, such a masterpiece, so poetic a statement about Jewish fate, that it was for a time left empty to work on its own, devoid of exhibits. What a dream for an architect! Belatedly an exhibition has been installed.

Perhaps this was the first idea in all sincerity--it was used as a demonstration at the interview, so it got him the job--but it is scarcely readable without the accompanying commentary (given in the entrance hall) and the articulation is not readily evident within the building. Set against the rectangular everyday norm, it is the zigzags and clashing diagonals of the interior that provide the most convincing symbols of conflict, giving real identity to the purpose of the building. Also potentially appropriate is the feeling of chaos in the labyrinth, but it never becomes awesome enough, and one finds one's way reassuringly soon. The spatial development is frankly disappointing, with little sense of promenade architecturale, harmonious or sublime, so the drama well caught by a two-dimensional photograph is not much added to. The most oppressive thing is the total lack of daylight. This might be read as symbolic: war is dark, but the curators and exhibition designers probably demanded it for their audio-visual display. It also reflects the current wisdom that daylight is damaging to objects. The norm is a black box, with everything flexible and completely controllable, a hermetic internal world. Perhaps I am being mean to Libeskind. With this demand for neutral space, most of the architect's usual palette was denied him. Many would have made the black box simply that: a rectangular box-like container with flat floors following the rational logic of the frame. (5) Libeskind's random generator works much better, making the interior irregular and unpredictable, and also a perspectival. It was no mean feat on his part to manage the collaboration with the exhibition designers so successfully, and he cheerfully put up with cuts of budget that would have made most architects tear their hair out. The large-scale sculpture works even if its connection with the site remains tenuous, and it puts Wilford's Lowry to shame. The public are coming in droves. Libeskind has also produced a textbook example of Deconstructivist archi tecture, and for the most appropriate possible programme--a celebration of the human capacity for destruction. For architectural historians this neatly fulfils the promise of that definitive turn-of-the-century style proclaimed in New York nearly ten years ago.

(1.) A curator suggested in the recent BBC film (see note 2) that its presence reflected the Eastern Bloc's devotion of resources to weapons rather than developing cars, but this is surely a gross oversimplification. The capitalist pressure to produce a new model every year is part of a culture of built-in obsolescence and envy, so perhaps the people's car needed to remain utilitarian and constant. The relation between civilian and military production is everywhere present and much more complicated.

(2.) War Museum of the North: Manchester's Renaissance introduced by Dan Cruickshank, produced and directed by Mark Jones, BBC Manchester 2002.

(3.) 'Geniessen Sie die Aussicht!' Hanno Rauterberg, Die Zeit, 14 February 2002, p40.

(4.) Not for the first time: the ill-fated National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield by Branson Coates has been called 'a built logo.'

(5.) For much of the twentieth century a rectangular grid was regarded as neutral, but it is a manifestation of a very particular order.

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Architect

Daniel Libeskind, Berlin

Associate architect

Leach Rhodes Walker

Project team

Daniel Libeskind, Marcus Aerni, Wendy James, Martin Ostermann, Soren Bisgard, Stefan Blach, Gerhard Brun, Christopher Duisberg, Lars Fischer, Lars Grabner, Jeanette Kuo, Susanne Milne, Daniel Richmond, Alexis Trumpf

Structural engineer

Ove Arup & Partners

Services engineer

Mott MacDonald 

Exhibition design

Event and Real Studios

Photographs

Richard Bryant/ARCAID, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7

Peter Cook/VIEW, 3, 5, 8, 9