Contested Heritage Narratives and the Critical Re-Interpretation of the Modernist Built Environment

Benjamin Carter

Transforming the Campus: Contested Heritage Narratives and the Critical Re-Interpretation of the Modernist Built Environment

Essay 4 - implementation study

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MANCHESTER CITY CENTRE

Figure 1 ← Frontispiece: View of the UMIST Campus showing modernist campus buildings in relation to prior heritage assets Figure 3 → → Overleaf: The UMIST Campus, aerial view, showing the campus in its most complete form. The campus is formed of a coherent urban ensemble of monumental buildings enclosing a series of courts

Figure 2 ↑ Above: Aerial View of Manchester City Centre East, showing relevant locations

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Modernist Urban Ensembles (in black) Co-operative estate - CIS/CWS Towers Piccadilly Plaza UMIST Campus

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Relevant Historic/Redevelopment Areas Ancoats Northern Quarter Whitworth Street Conservation Area Manchester Piccadilly HS2 SRF

Benjamin Carter

Transforming the Campus: Contested Heritage Narratives and the Critical Re-Interpretation of the Modernist Built Environment

essay submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design Benjamin Carter - Essay 4 implementation University of Cambridge Gonville and Caius College October 2021 4,890 words

Contents

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Abstract Introduction: Contested Heritage Narratives Part One: Authorised and Disruptive Heritage Authorised Urban Narratives The Case for a Disruptive Heritage Part Two: Transforming the Campus Divergent Futures: Campus Conservation Area Divergent Futures: ID Manchester Coda: A Resilient Approach to the Modernist Built Environment List of Illustrations Bibliography Abbreviations

UMIST AHD SRF MCC C20 ID

University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology Authorised Heritage Discourse Strategic Regeneration Framework Manchester City Council Twentieth Century Society Innovation District

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Abstract In its established identity as the prototypal industrial city, the Mancunian urban narrative is captured in its past as a crucible of manufacturing and industry. Against this dominant narrative, this essay focuses on the legacy of the modernist built environment, proposing an implementation framework at the UMIST Campus. Structured in three sections, this essay segues from debates concerning abstract urban narratives and heritage policy, to the specific; examining live proposals for conservation campaigns and redevelopment plans at the campus, contextualising this double bind within a critique of current practices. Navigating these proposals, this essay posits an alternative narrative and implementation framework for modernist environments, and advocates a multi-scale approach for intervention incorporating their urban, architectural and perceptual value.

Introduction: Contested Heritage Narratives In Manchester, the entrepreneurial spirit of the city is captured in the metonym ‘Cottonopolis’, which evokes its pre-eminence as a historic locus of industry. The breakneck process of industrialisation which gave Manchester the title of ‘the Shock City of the Age’ met with an equally disruptive process of deindustrialisation following the decline of manufacturing industries, only to be matched once more by the postwar period of modernisation1. Harnessing the value of the industrial city identity, municipal authorities pursue a boosterist policy of civic self-aggrandisement drawing upon the heritage of the industrial past, sanctioning an ‘authorised’ heritage narrative of mercantile prowess enshrined in imposing mills and warehouses. It has been argued elsewhere that the selective valorisation of the city’s industrial past is an attempt to co-opt its promotional value at the expense of other potentially legitimate forms of heritage2. Whilst the city is able to exploit the cultural capital of its industrial past, it does not yet have the capacity to articulate a narrative which integrates its industrial and postwar built heritage; as the dominance of the former eclipses the potential of modernist patrimony.

Citations Paul Readman, ‘Manchester - Shock Landscape?’, in Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.199-200.

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Aidan While and Michael Short, ‘Place Narratives and Heritage Management: The Modernist Legacy in Manchester’, Area, 43:1 (2011), pp. 4-13.

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Figure 4 ↑ The mills of Ancoats: The Morphology of the mill captures the image of the city and serves as a paradigm for new urban patterns and architectural forms.

Contested Heritage Narratives & the Critical Re-Interpretation of the Modernist Built Environment

While retrofit and adaptive reuse become more prevalent in mainstream architectural discourse surrounding heritage and the urban environment, the relevance of addressing the resilience of existing buildings in practice becomes increasingly imperative. The heritage of our existing building stock is varied, however approximately 60% of Europe’s built environment consists of postwar buildings3. The ubiquity of the modernist built environment reflects the postwar enterprise of reconstruction which tends to be marginalised in heritage discourse and suppressed by national and civic leaders in the view that it is incompatible with their authorised view of heritage4. As shall be seen, this represents a schism in opinion concerning postwar modernist architecture which precedes informed debate on conservation and reuse, eliciting a dilemma of value judgement commonly dominated by official narratives from conservation and planning authorities.

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Figure 5 ↑ Piccadilly Plaza: Modernist urban ensembles are characterised by perceptibly three-dimensional forms combined to generate compositional arrangements.

As a form of disruptive heritage and a complete modernist environment, counteracting the privileged status of Manchester’s industrial heritage, the UMIST Campus promotes values compatible with the city’s identity as an forerunner of industry and technology. In the present essay, this campus will act as a benchmark for discourse concerning heritage and urban narratives. The campus has the latent potential to expand upon the established urban narrative of scientific innovation espoused by city leaders, as an evidential monument to the city’s postwar rebirth under a knowledge economy, complementary to historic manufacturing5. This essay will propose how the campus can become a resilient heritage area whilst supporting municipal directives of urban identity-formation and redevelopment, rather than as a constraint to those ends.

Over the following pages this essay will examine what constitutes authorised heritage and the associated instrumentalist perception of value.

Conversely, the essay will investigate attempts at resistance against the status quo through campaigns in favour of disruptive heritage, i.e. those which subvert dominant narratives. Finally, through an examination of a case study at the centre of this debate and a critical counterproposal in favour of viable reuse, this essay establishes a framework for development which capitalises on modernist heritage.

Adaptive Re-Use: Strategies for Post-War Modernist Housing, ed. By Maren Harnack, Nathalie Heger, and Matthias Brunner, (Berlin: Jovis, 2020), p.

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Aidan While and Michael Short, (2011), op. cit., pp. 4-13.

Martin Dodge and Richard Brook, ‘From Manufacturing Industries to a Services Economy: The Emergence of a ‘New Manchester’ in the Nineteen Sixties’, in Making Post-War Manchester: Visions of an Unmade City (Manchester, 2016) 5

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Part One: Authorised and Disruptive Heritage 1.1 Authorised Urban Narratives Authorised heritage discourse (Hereafter AHD) is the practice of artificially assigning value to heritage artefacts which serve to reinforce constructed identities and dominant narratives6. Increasingly implicit in conservation, planning, and architectural discourse, AHD constitutes a technocratic basis for what warrants heritage designation, based upon previous cycles of validation and emulation. Albeit implemented by conservation and planning authorities for decades avant la lettre, AHD is now practiced by an assortment of heritage bodies who codify and assign value to the historic built environment, as well as municipal authorities seeking to gain from the profitability of authorised heritage, and architects; whose aesthetic and morphological judgements have the most immediately visible influence on the image and form of the city. AHD has been found to be complementary to the process of economic development in urban areas, harnessing heritage as an apparatus to market urban identity7.

Consequently, the potential for AHD to co-opt the image of the built environment in order to advance municipal agendas empowers that same authority to consolidate a curated urban form by influencing conservation debates, which in turn influences conservation practice; engendering a homogenising cycle of heritage valorisation. This artificial conversion of cultural heritage into commodities is known as heritagisation.

Official control over this process privileges certain forms of heritage over others enacted through the close relationship between conservation and urban planning administrations, where reaffirmative reasoning can have a significant effect on determining what constitutes heritage influenced by municipal agendas. This reveals that the form of cities can be influenced at the local level; by boosterism and affiliation with selected types of heritage by municipal authorities, and at the national level; by technocratic organisations of heritage experts, and the political relationship established by perceived mutual interests between what is termed the ‘conservationplanning assemblage’8.

An illustration of the power and reciprocity of political and heritage bodies working concertedly is demonstrated by the rejuvenation and identity-formation of the Northern Quarter area of Manchester. An AHD devised and propagated by Manchester City Council in association with Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 85114.

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John Pendlebury, ‘Conservation Values, the Authorised Heritage Discourse and the Conservation-Planning Assemblage’, in International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19:7 (2013), pp. 709-727.

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Ibid.

Figure 6 ↑ The disproportionate ratio of prewar listed buildings (right: CWS building, Grade II) in contrast to modernist listed buildings (left: New Century House, Grade II) renders the latter exceptional.

However, their adjacency demonstrates how their dissonant relationship can highlight urban evolution to a participatory public.

Contested Heritage Narratives & the Critical Re-Interpretation of the Modernist Built Environment

then-English Heritage initiated the renaissance of a former commercial district, fashioning a title for the previously unnamed area and valorising its Georgian and Victorian architecture through conservation area status and publications9. Place-making which registers existing identity should generally be seen as a positive contribution to urban geographies, more dubious however, is the manufacturing of an artificial heritage simulating authentic aesthetics for the very same ends.

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Figures 7 and 8 ↑ New development in Ancoats replicates the urban condition and streetscape of the historic mill, perpetuating existing AHD biases.

The adjacent district of Ancoats is regarded as the physical groundzero of the industrial revolution, whose magnificent mill architecture was mirrored by the magnitude of the privation of workers within10. In light of the regenerative and economic success of the desirable Northern Quarter, developers and investors such as Urban Splash and Manchester Life (the latter established by Manchester City Council), set their eyes upon the desolate area of Ancoats, with its abundance of vacant plots set amongst towering historically-significant mills. The redevelopment of Ancoats coopts the form of the historic mills which abut the street edge forming deep canyon-like streets, intensively developing the new Ancoats as a simulacrum of the historic industrial Ancoats.

The morphology of the mill - both economical in construction and lucrative in spatial exploitation - perseveres as the paradigm for development in Manchester, applied indiscriminately to assortments of new buildings, notwithstanding their intended purpose nor the oppressive connotations of the mill11. What this demonstrates is the municipal directive to conserve, Simon Taylor and Julian Holder, Manchester’s Northern Quarter: Greatest Meer Village, (Swindon: English Heritage, 2008), p. 1.

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Michael E. Rose, Keith Falconer and Julian Holder, Ancoats: Cradle of Industrialisation, (Swindon: English Heritage, 2011), p. 1.

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Eamonn Canniffe, ‘Urban Morphology and the Post-Industrial City: Commercial Space in Manchester’, in The Journal of Public Space, 1 (2016) 11

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curate, and manufacture heritage which serves its aim of perpetuating an authorised city image, even at the expense of fabricating an illusion of heritage areas, consequently diluting the authenticity of actual heritage by imitation. Compounding this process of heritagisation, the case of Ancoats illustrates a form of urban-amnesia: a volition to erase the undesirable aspects of history in a simulated experience of a newly-created historicist environment. This replication can be conceived as iconography emptied of meaning.

Industrial histories are apt to make compelling AHD subjects, given their importance to the conservation-planning assemblage, and this essay posits two such examples of the mutual interest of conserving and exploiting historic identity in Manchester. Herein we see the instrumental value of heritage serving the extrinsic objective of property development, with architecture and urban design involved in the commodification of the built environment. Against claims of gentrification, conservation authorities such as Historic England, gain by ostensibly conserving significant historic environments, and municipal authorities, in this instance MCC, gain by ameliorating dilapidated areas and reinforcing an established genius loci.

But what of alternative forms of heritage not recognised by municipal authorities which have the potential to disrupt sanctioned appearances and narratives? Can counter-narratives serve to enrich the identity of a city, rather than disintegrate it?

1.2 The Case for Disruptive Heritage The heritagisation of Manchester’s physical and incorporeal history to privilege its industrial past has served, by official validation and emulation, to create a homogenised city identity reinstating the illusion of the ‘Cottonopolis’ and revealing a nostalgic longing for the city’s supremacy as an industrial powerhouse in the 18th Century. Under the entrepreneurial mode of urban governance, heritage is only useful insofar as it can be instrumental in promoting objectives such as economic and property development12. The two-dimensionality of its official heritage belies the architectural plurality of Manchester’s built environment which, although consisting primarily of a largely intact gridded mercantile core of areas such as the Northern Quarter, is interspersed with significant albeit officially unappreciated postwar buildings and ensembles13.

Most extensive amongst these modernist ensembles - which occupy entire city blocks - are Piccadilly Plaza (fig. 5,10,11), the Co-operative Estate consisting of CIS and CWS towers (fig. 6,9), and the former UMIST Campus, the latter being the most comprehensive remaining environment, apprehensible as an urban quarter in its own right14. Built in the postwar and postindustrial urban restructuring of Manchester’s physical and economic organisation, these ensembles present the city with new urban ideas, manifested in a trend towards dramatic formal compositions implanted into an existing urban fabric.

The proximity of authorised heritage environments relative to postwar environments is clearly manifested by these ensembles, which tower over conservation areas such as the aforementioned Northern Quarter, punctuating the cityscape and creating layered urban compositions, counterposing distinct periods in the city’s development in a clearly public domain. The townscape value of Manchester’s modernist heritage is elicited by the visual superimposition of these contrasting temporal strata: a scenographic layering of architectural monuments which serve as Michael Edema Leary, ‘The Production of Urban Public Space: A Lefebvrian Analysis of Castlefield, Manchester’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 2010), p. 42.

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Richard Brook, ‘Manchester Modern: the Shape of the City’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2010), p. 93.

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Aidan While and Michael Short, (2011), op. cit., p. 7.

Figure 9 ↑ Comprehensive urban ensembles such as the Co-operative Estate were seen as opportunities to reconfigure the cityscape as part of a greater enterprise of political and economic restructuring

Contested Heritage Narratives & the Critical Re-Interpretation of the Modernist Built Environment

mnemonic devices interrupting the city’s historic continuum. The apparent contrast between distinct environments contributes to the overall form of the city made legible through heterogenous heritage. What this suggests is that alterity - that is different types of heritage made visible to the public - can form a disruptive heritage, capable of engaging a participatory public audience.

Once radical negations of the postindustrial cityscape, large modernist set-pieces remain potent symbols of a past where programmes of urban restructuring modified the city both physically and economically; a transformative period only comparable to Manchester’s industrial revolution. Postwar reconstruction of the physical fabric of cities was also an opportunity to reorder urban identity on a more profound level in response to deindustrialisation15. Where once the urban narrative hinged upon the erasure of past conditions, contemporary narratives recover historic identity in an ongoing cycle of historic negation and reaffirmation.

The very same manipulation of previous identity which characterised comprehensive postwar development is once again apparent in the mentality of entrepreneurial municipal leaders attempting, more indirectly, to control official narratives through the political - as a prerequisite to the physical - restructuring of the city.

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Figures 10 and 11 ↑ A layered cityscape.

Monuments of modernist heritage contribute to the image of the city in Manchester, an urban scene along Oldham St, Northern Quarter, looking towards Piccadilly Plaza.

Two distinct ideas of urbanism are simultaneously engaged: the linear condition of gridded Northern Quarter is counterposed by the extension of planar objects in space characteristic of modernist spatiality.

The syncopation of space and time elicited by the dissonance between heterogeneous heritages indicates an active disruptive heritage capable of challenging the linearity of authorised heritage environments, permitting a more nuanced interpretation of urban environments.

Modernist monuments, it has been argued, can contribute subversive Rowland Nicholas, City of Manchester Plan 1945 (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons, 1945) Elain Harwood, ‘White Light/White Heat: Rebuilding England’s Provincial Towns and Cities in the Sixties’, in Twentieth Century Architecture, 6 (2002), p. 66.

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and paradoxically complementary histories to Manchester’s heritage discourse, supplanting a totalising industrial narrative with a heterogenous heritage argument incorporating postwar ensembles as visual and evidential monuments. Manchester, since its mercantile and industrial years to its postwar years, has been a city whose identity is founded on technological progress, whether manifested in its pioneering mill buildings or its modernist buildings for new technologies16. However, this narrative is biased towards prewar industrial heritage at the expense of more recent manifestations of this same history, the next section contextualises divergent approaches to the modernist built environment which will be examined in relation to specific policy.

Part Two: Transforming the Campus Authorised heritage discourse is closely aligned with urban redevelopment programmes, where official narratives can inform the scope and character of change. This essay has thus far examined how the form of cities is manipulated by AHD in the case of Manchester’s historic centre. The following study will examine two extremes in the dilemma of nascent heritage environments in relation to the pressures of urban renewal, analysed through recent campaigns and masterplans respectively.

The modernist UMIST Campus is a former urban university campus which at the time of writing has been decommissioned, following the same fate as the eponymous university, and is in the process of decanting to a new facility on the University of Manchester’s main site. The UMIST Campus was built on former industrial land as part of Manchester’s restructuring under a services and knowledge economy in order to overcome the atrophy of deindustrialisation. In this fashion, the UMIST Campus was an acutely visible symbol of the new Manchester, both physically and economically superseding industries in terminal decline with monumental architecture dedicated to education, science and technology. Part of a greater enterprise of postwar urban restructuring, vast projects such as these reimagined the city. Reanimating its appellation as the ‘Shock City of the Age’, the new age of ‘White Heat’ and technological revolution sharply counterposed the image of the smoke-stained city of the industrial revolution. By focusing on the less deterministic shock city narrative, in opposition to the Cottonopolis narrative, a more resilient but no less holistic urban image can be formed, of an enterprising city at the forefront of dramatic societal reformation. This expanded narrative forms the basis of a conservation approach to recognise the heritage value of the campus.

cf. examples of the latter: National Computing Centre (1974), UMIST Campus Pilot Plant (1966), ICI Hexagon Tower (1971), ICL Tower (demolished) 16

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Figure 12 and 13 ↓ Previous transformations: figure ground comparison of the Temple Street area and subsequent UMIST Campus - the Jackson Street Mill is highlighted as a consistent feature.

Left: previous condition of factories and residences circumscribed by a meander in the river Medlock (black).

Right: UMIST Campus during construction, establishing a generous new pattern of open courts protected from the Mancunian Way motorway (black).

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Figure 14 ↑ Group Value: the integrity of the campus derives from the coherent relationship of individual buildings.

Figure 17 ↑ Urban Presence: the campus core is understood by its townscape value of related spaces, the campus as seen from the ‘exterior’ projects a monumental image on the skyline

Figure 15 ↓ Diagonal Movement: Open spaces are linked at the corners to create an alternating solid-void sequence - oblique movement through spaces opens views to courts beyond

Figure 16 ↓ Scenographic Surfaces: relationships between planar and articulated elevations compose a scenographic urbanism alternating between expansive and compressive spaces

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Figure 18 ↑ Tower and Podium: expressive monuments surmount podia on the scale of the cityscape, which enclose a series of courts at the scale of the groundscape.

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Figure 19 ↑ Common Typologies: the Renold Building was the first tower and podium building in the UK, its pleated compositional face projects the form of the internal stack of lecture theatres externally

Figure 20 ↑ Campus as Interior: the campus is the most comprehensive modernist environment in Manchester, forming a state of exception to its urban environs Figure 21 ↓ Rus in Urbe: the campus subverts the historic condition of streets in favour of a pedestrian precinct of framed landscapes

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2.1 Divergent Futures: Campus Conservation Area Propositions to conserve the campus have been considered at a local and statutory levels, yet have failed to gain political traction. Historic England, the heritage organisation responsible for classifying protected heritage assets, identify the campus core as an undesignated heritage asset of ‘considerable merit’, especially in the correspondence of architectural and urban design17. The urban value of the campus derives from its integrity as a comprehensive environment where the reciprocity of considered architecture, landscape and urbanism elide to form one of the city’s most consolidated areas. Insofar as the campus can be considered a coherent urban entity which functions on the scale of the city as much as the scale of the individual building, attempts to grade list individual artefacts in the campus become counter-productive, essentially ossifying the form of select artefacts whilst enabling others to be altered or demolished: compromising integral relationships between the parts which constitute the whole.

Individual listing further undermines the group value of the campus, defined as comprising ‘historic unity’, a ‘fine example of planning’ or a ‘functional relationship between buildings’; three criteria satisfied by the integrated disposition of the campus18. There is only one postwar listed structure on the campus - the sculptural ‘Holloway’ wall listed grade II attempts to list the Renold Building (fig. 16,19,30,31), widely recognised as the most significant postwar campus building were refused in 2005 and 200819.

Figure 22 ↑ The Holloway Sculptural Wall (grade II) screens the campus from London Road to the east, it is the only listed postwar campus structure.

Figure 23 ← Campus aerial view showing listed structures (black) and the Whitworth Street Conservation Area (grey). With the exception of the original campus building north of the railway viaduct, the campus proper is excluded from the conservation area.

Manchester City Council Chief Executive, ‘North Campus Strategic Regeneration Framework’, Manchester City Council Report for Resolution, Item 17, (2017), p.

18 <https://democracy.manchester.gov.uk/Data/ Executive/20170308/Agenda/17_North_Campus.pdf> [accessed 9 September 2021] 17

Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, ‘Principles of Selection for Listed Buildings’, (2018), p. 6 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/757054/ Revised_Principles_of_Selection_2018.pdf> [accessed 16 August 2021] 18

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An alternative approach and counter-campaign was launched in 2012 by the Manchester chapter of the Modernist Society, which sought to unofficially designate the UMIST Campus as a conservation area.

Conservation area designation, which additionally protects the spatial relationships between buildings in a capacity unavailable to grade listing, serves modernist ensembles such as the campus by encompassing architecture, urbanism and landscape within its protection whilst tolerating appropriate architectural adaptation. This bottom-up campaign to conserve the campus drew upon the site’s evidential value as much as its architectural value, with the conferment of mock degrees, such as a Bachelor’s in Modernism, installation of building heritage plaques, and the cordoning of key buildings with crime scene tape as part of an ‘campus residency’. This active and situated form of campaigning for conservation subverts the intellectual basis of conservation practice today, indicating that alternative heritage discourses are based on public participation, rather than unilateral narratives.

The objective of this local initiative, whilst intended to publicise and celebrate the merits of the campus, was investigated further in 2017 by the Twentieth Century Society, in their assessment of the UMIST Campus as a viable conservation area20. Ultimately, both attempts in favour of campus conservation area designation were not pursued beyond their preliminary stage, indicating that despite its considerable merit the campus did not gain enough traction with municipal authorities nor align with national policy guidance on what constitutes valid heritage.

Figure 24 ↑ Counter-initiatives for conservation: the certificate presented to graduates as part of the UMIST Campus residency highlights evidential value.

Figure 25 ← Preliminary visualisation for ID Manchester pursuant to the MCC-endorsed North Campus SRF

2.2 Divergent Futures: ID Manchester In current debates the modernist built environment is marginalised within authorised heritage discourse, compounded by a lack of standard precedents for effective building reuse. The specific case of the UMIST Campus is a microcosm of the national picture concerning the dilemma of the modernist built environment, whereby a complex calculation of building management, viability assessments and economic programmes weigh disproportionately against the merits of conservation. Contemporary high profile cases have seen listed building owners contend with local opposition when this calculation deems their heritage asset to be unfit 19

Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, ‘Principles of Selection for Listed Buildings’, (2018), p. 6 <https://assets.publishing.service. gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/757054/ Revised_Principles_of_Selection_2018.pdf> [accessed 16 August 2021] 20

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Aidan While and Michael Short, (2011), op. cit., p. 10.

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for purpose, with the recourse to demolition offering the most expedient solution21. Such an eventuality initiated the Modernist Society campaign, when it became apparent that the University of Manchester, who maintain the freehold on the UMIST Campus estate, intends to demolish and redevelop the majority of the campus as an Innovation District, marketed as ID Manchester.

Now subject to a host of MCC-endorsed Strategic Regeneration Frameworks in connection with wider municipal plans for redevelopment, the official proposals for ID Manchester are gathering momentum, as the university enter in a joint venture for a vast capital project to speculatively develop the site aimed at technology companies22. As part of the 2017 North Campus SRF, the only building to be retained in its entirety would be the Sackville Street building, the original Edwardian building at the scale of a city block which predates the modernist UMIST Campus. Under the plan, the Renold Building, a tower and podium lecture block and centrepiece of the modernist campus, would be partially retained whilst its podium would be removed to accommodate new development, whilst the listed Holloway sculptural wall would be dismantled to enable a more permeable boundary to the site. The remaining postwar campus buildings would be demolished. A more recent masterplan indicates the retention of the Jackson Street Mill building, which too predates the modernist campus acting as a monument to the pre-existing industrial condition. By studying the proposed SRF documents relating to the redevelopment of the UMIST Campus, it is possible to extrapolate which structures retain official value in the plans for the Innovation District, and by extension, in which structures economic value outweighs heritage value.

Figure 26 and 27 ↑ ← Emerging proposals for ID Manchester retain the tower component of the Renold Building as a fix in the plan, yet its group value is nullified by the demolition of its podium and related existing buildings which form its setting.

cf. Dunelm House, Durham (listed July 2021); Dorman Long tower, Tees Valley (demolished September 2021) 21

Bennetts Associates Architects, ‘Manchester Piccadilly SRF’, (2018), p. 86. <https://secure.manchester.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/25691/ manchester_piccadilly_srf_march_2018.pdf> [accessed 22 September 2021] 22

Bennetts Associates Architects ‘Corridor Manchester: North Campus SRF’, (2017) <https://secure.manchester.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/27287/ north_campus_srf_may_2017.pdf> [accessed 22 September 2021]

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Figure 28 ← Extent of campus buildings to be demolished under the North Campus SRF (black), buildings previously demolished (grey). Only two postwar buildings are partially retained

From these case studies it is apparent that a dichotomy exists between the prewar and postwar architectural buildings on the campus. By studying approved strategic regeneration frameworks for the ID site, official narratives which favour Manchester’s identity as an industrial city are privileged over its identity as a university in the era of ‘white heat’. This is a bias evidenced in the proposed retention of both the prewar buildings (Sackville Street and Jackson Mill) versus the erasure of all modernist buildings save Renold Building and the Holloway Wall, both of which would be compromised by partial demolition.

In their response to the endorsed SRF, the C20 Society contend that the approach taken favouring extensive demolition does not align with the SRF’s stated objective to acknowledge the history of the campus.

In particular, the dismantling of the grade listed Holloway Wall was seen to contravene the National Planning Policy Framework, whilst the C20 Society continued to recommend the Renold Building be registered as a non-designated heritage asset. As the first tower and podium type building in the country, the removal of the podium element would undermine the typological and aesthetic integrity of the whole. Aside from specific buildings, the C20 response indicates that an approach favouring wholesale redevelopment is inappropriate for the campus, recommending instead a conservation-led development23.

Notwithstanding the fact that a campus designed for science and technology could support Manchester’s narrative of a city of industry given their thematic similarity, this wider narrative is overridden by the image of the industrial city, affiliated to buildings such as the proposedretained Jackson Mill. Consequently, we see in the plans a regression from the generous modernist sequence of spacious courts, to the canyonlike streets of the industrial city so deliberately expunged by the UMIST Campus planners24. Employing morphology, visual appearance, and spatiality as its instruments, authorised heritage discourse can influence the image of the city subtly, through architectural form rather than explicit rhetoric.

These live proposals contextualise two divergent trends concerning modernist heritage arguments today, polarised between conservation campaigns from the Modernist and C20 Society, and redevelopment from corporate joint ventures reflecting a divisive political context.

Tess Pinto, ‘Public Consultation: North Campus Strategic Regeneration Framework’, (Email to City Centre Regeneration Team, 13 January 2017) 23

Bertram V. Bowden, Proposals for the Development of the Manchester College of Science and Technology, (Manchester: Manchester College of Science and Technology, 1956) pp. 134-135.

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Figure 29 ↓ Evidential Heritage: As a monument to an industrial past, this remnant of Havelock Mill stands in the main quadrangle at UMIST; indicating the link between historic industrial narratives and modernist heritage dedicated to new technologies

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Essay 4 - implementation study

The apparent impasse which characterises these arguments both in Manchester and nationally, whereby conservation is understood as a barrier to redevelopment and vice-versa, reveals a situation in which heritage is useful to urban administrations insofar as it can promote property development or package an urban narrative. In the examination of this instrumental heritage as a tool to reinforce established narratives, we can conclude that a dominant urban narrative serves to suppress alternative forms of heritage apt to heighten the experience of heritage through disruption. This tension played out on the scale of the city enables a participatory heritage, where intangible processes of historic evolution become manifest in the form of the city, opposing the homogeneity of a protected historic district. This essay has examined how statutory protection of heritage (or even undesignated existing buildings) can become an obstacle to the process of urban change, and contributes to the polarisation of conservation versus redevelopment arguments. The final section illustrates three criteria through which the modernist built environment should be interpreted, as the precondition to any design intervention.

Figure 30 and 31 ↑ ← holistic relationship: the reciprocity of architectural and urban elements at the UMIST Campus necessitate an approach cognisant of their inseparability. For instance, propositions to demolish parts of the Renold podium, or other complementary buildings with which it forms a group, undermine the value of the campus as a complete entity.

Coda: A Resilient Approach to the Modernist Built Environment This section defines a three-part architectural approach for addressing the modernist built environment in light of the overarching theme of this essay: tangible heritage and the construction of an intangible city narrative. Based on the premise established across the course of this essay - that rigid heritage narratives exclude valid heritage artefacts, in turn stagnating in a static urban identity - what follows are three essential criteria for any design approach for rehabilitating modernist heritage in order to re-establish its value. These criteria attempt to satisfy and surpass the divergent approaches set out in the previous section, contextualised within a heritage framework which incorporates industrial and postwar sources, in an overarching attempt to deconstruct AHD in favour of an inclusive urban narrative.

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urban criterion Modern architecture is more conceptual than traditional urban environments, whose familiarity is easier to value by association, as has been examined in the case of the Northern Quarter and Ancoats ‘neighbourhoods’. Without common criteria for experiencing modernist environments, they can be destabilising presences, which communicate urban ideals less apprehensible to urban subjects. With a great emphasis on space, rather than the popular perception of the autonomous object, Modernism privileges the space between buildings composing urban configurations of related buildings. The valorisation of incorporeal space as a reified phenomenon is a key tenet of modernist urbanism, which generated an understanding of situational space - based on the factor of time, as experienced by the active subject. This understanding of space, which related architectural monuments within a corresponding spatial and temporal structure was the criteria by which the modernist built environment was designed; considering how static buildings would be viewed in motion, and experienced through the lens of a participatory citizen, in opposition to the stationary viewpoint of the subject under previous urbanisms25. Where historically perspective had dominated the experience of urban space, in space-time, cities would be comprehended through the possibilities of movement and come to represent modernist spatiality. The image of cities such as Manchester defined by the perspectival linearity of its streets would give way to an expanded urban experience based on the relationship of people and the modernist built environment.

Detlef Mertins, Modernity Unbound: Other Histories of Architectural Modernity, Architecture Words 7, (London: AA Publications, 2012) pp. 47-61.

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Ibid. p. 179.

Figure 32 ↓ The UMIST Campus seen from the approach into the city, designed to be seen from the aerial motorway whilst protecting the campus interior from noise

Due to the transient nature of this spatial phenomenon, situational space resists the ability to be monumentalised as heritage, given the difficulty in circumscribing space and time as a codified heritage artefact. Therefore, whilst fundamental to the relational organisation of the modernist built environment, situational spaces can be easily eroded as their qualities are derived from the ephemeral experience of the citizen, and the distinctive relationship between potentially generic buildings. This inability to contain space as a commodified heritage object discounts modernist environments such as the UMIST Campus from statutory protection.

IMPLEMENTATION CRITERION ONE In a resilient approach to the modernist built environment, the relational value of space must be factored in to any proposal to conserve or redesign the campus as the structuring basis for a heritage which values a wider experience than the purely optical

architectural criterion The mythical inseparability of form and function under Modernism belies the versatility of modernist architecture. The technological basis of rationalist Modernism issues from the economic form of structural progenitors such as the industrial mill, whose load bearing frame and large reconfigurable interiors - through the logic of infill - relate industrial and modernist architecture in a lineage of adaptable architecture. Just as the function of the mills changed over time to accommodate new uses whilst retaining their historic envelope, the capacity of modernist architecture to undergo similar internal transformations is a quality which enables programmatic change yet respects urban continuity. Economic arguments which impinge upon the debate fail to register the versatility of modernist buildings, whose spatial indeterminacy is capable of hosting new uses and alteration with greater efficiency than its industrial antecedent.

Epitomised in Le Corbusier’s archetypal Maison Dom-ino, a permanent frame system which facilitates endless variation of the envelope and infill, this was a paradigm which would be proliferated globally, providing a structural armature for innumerable configurations26. Given the use of repetitive systems such as these at the UMIST Campus, this adaptability provides the basis for an alternative approach which could rectify the double bind of conservation versus redevelopment whereby inherent

character of the exterior is separated from and enables adaptation of the interior. Structural frames provide a replicable scaffold for expansion, alteration, and reconfiguration derived from Modernism’s technological narrative whilst enabling new specific mutations to emerge. The indeterminacy provided by this system is a simple demonstration of how form and function are neither inseparable nor mutually inhibitive, and how modification of one can inform transformation of the other.

In the case of the UMIST Campus, the logic of frame and infill presents possibilities for adaptive reuse currently not envisioned by conservation campaigns nor redevelopment plans, and whilst more specific architectural forms will require imaginative programmatic changes, the majority of built fabric is conditioned to host a new function.

IMPLEMENTATION CRITERION TWO In a resilient approach to the modernist built environment, the technological and organisational logic of the building provides a bridge between universal ideals and its adaptation to specific conditions perceptual criterion If modernist architecture is to overcome biases which exclude it from official narratives, perceptual change is a necessary precondition to rehabilitating urban ensembles. Cultural change must focus on integrating potentially disruptive heritage into urban narratives in such a way as to retain their alterity with respect to previous heritage, whilst recognising their position within a historical continuum. The ideological shift this would require must engage multiple audiences, beyond the technocratic groups which designate official heritage, to inform and include the general public in debate. The challenge involved here is to refrain from the postmodernist tropes of populism or historicism in the design of cities, in order that they do not perpetuate an authorised city image, but to critically intervene and reinterpret, rather than reproduce.

The role of architects and planners in achieving this end is fundamental.

The capacity to change perceptions through the design of cities is primarily the domain of the architect, whose ability to interpret historic environments appears to have faltered under historicism, thus obscuring reinterpretation behind attempts at conformity. Perceptual change can not occur by rehearsing historic conditions in the absence of judgements which are critical of those same conditions. By examining part-historic, part-fabricated heritage environments, this essay has demonstrated how heritagisation undermines the veracity of true heritage by affirmation, rather than heightening perceptions. In opposition to the trend to imitate, a resilient approach involves the creative reinterpretation of historic environments based on current cultural criteria as a transformative principle.

Architects must register the temporal distinction between historic environments and the real culture in which they intervene in order to be both critical and analogical. Only by recognising the extra-architectural factors of urban change can a resilient approach be established, allowing these cultural factors to mutate perceptional criteria for contemporary purposes.

Figure 33 ↑ Structurally-isolated curtain wall systems and rational structural logic permits adapatation of both exterior and interior arrangements to suit current purposes

IMPLEMENTATION CRITERION THREE In a resilient approach to the modernist built environment, architecture must go through a process of historic deformation, prior to cultural reformation under contemporary conditions

Transforming the Campus

Essay 4 - implementation study

List of Illustrations

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Degree certificate designed by Jonathan Hitchen, <https://umistcampus.files.wordpress. com/2012/06/mod_deg_aw_4r6_art_front.jpg> [accessed 2 October 2021]

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<https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/planningconstruction-news/id-manchester-districtdeveloper/63131/> [accessed 2 October 2021]

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Allies and Morrison, Instagram <https://www. instagram.com/p/CP5zdabs-Nu/> [accessed 9 June 2021]

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Allies and Morrison, Instagram <https://www. instagram.com/p/CP0HnF0M9mP/> [accessed 7 June 2021]

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Contested Heritage Narratives & the Critical Re-Interpretation of the Modernist Built Environment

Essay 4 - implementation study

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Transforming the Campus

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