kat2
November 18th, 2007, 05:02 PM
From The TimesNovember 10, 2007
Grand Designs
From the graceful to the garish and the grandiose, Liverpool's unique architectural character is the key to its past - and future
Oriel Chambers
Image :9 of 9
Stephen Bayley
I seldom revisit Liverpool, but it often visits me. I wasn’t born in the city, but grew up there until I left, at 17, to go to university. So I had all those primal experiences that form a personality there: going to school, riding a bike, passing exams, discovering passions, looking at art, learning to drink, learning to smoke (failed), meeting a girl, meeting more girls, learning to drive, loving books, leaving home. But perhaps even more than sex, drink and cars, and, I suppose, books, it was walking about the city that made me.
Liverpool has a unique architectural character – unique on a global scale – but it is also very different to its near neighbour, Manchester. Liverpool was always mercantile and commercial, and the rich shipping barons, sugar merchants and edible fats entrepreneurs loved flaunting their wealth in the city centre, building fine houses, parks, pubs and galleries. Even today, many first-time visitors are astonished at the grandiose scale and swagger of Liverpool’s financial district, with its branch of the Bank of England, its stock exchange and its Victorian office buildings, whose daring structures predicted Chicago and New York skyscrapers by several decades.
By contrast, Manchester was an industrial and manufacturing centre: uncompromisingly workaday, with gloomy, sooty warehouses and mills at its heart, and the prosperous folk fleeing the city to live in leafy suburbs. Not for nothing was there an old saying, “Salford lads, Manchester boys, but Liverpool – gentlemen”
More here
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article2810581.ece
kat:)
Grand Designs
From the graceful to the garish and the grandiose, Liverpool's unique architectural character is the key to its past - and future
Oriel Chambers
Image :9 of 9
Stephen Bayley
I seldom revisit Liverpool, but it often visits me. I wasn’t born in the city, but grew up there until I left, at 17, to go to university. So I had all those primal experiences that form a personality there: going to school, riding a bike, passing exams, discovering passions, looking at art, learning to drink, learning to smoke (failed), meeting a girl, meeting more girls, learning to drive, loving books, leaving home. But perhaps even more than sex, drink and cars, and, I suppose, books, it was walking about the city that made me.
Liverpool has a unique architectural character – unique on a global scale – but it is also very different to its near neighbour, Manchester. Liverpool was always mercantile and commercial, and the rich shipping barons, sugar merchants and edible fats entrepreneurs loved flaunting their wealth in the city centre, building fine houses, parks, pubs and galleries. Even today, many first-time visitors are astonished at the grandiose scale and swagger of Liverpool’s financial district, with its branch of the Bank of England, its stock exchange and its Victorian office buildings, whose daring structures predicted Chicago and New York skyscrapers by several decades.
By contrast, Manchester was an industrial and manufacturing centre: uncompromisingly workaday, with gloomy, sooty warehouses and mills at its heart, and the prosperous folk fleeing the city to live in leafy suburbs. Not for nothing was there an old saying, “Salford lads, Manchester boys, but Liverpool – gentlemen”
More here
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article2810581.ece
kat:)