The Museum of Liverpool

Photography by Jeffrey Kilmer

The immense, white hull that’s risen along the ports in Liverpool, England isn’t a groovy new ocean liner.  It’s the Museum of Liverpool, a building designed by Danish architecture office 3XN that will open in July.  The canted walls of this gently twisted structure are clad with triangulated stone tiles that give it a rich, scale-like texture.  It opens up at the bottom into pedestrian ramps and stairs, and houses a swirling, central staircase that will pull visitors inside and through exhibits that highlight the city’s unique cultural history.  Liverpool is most famous as a way station.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was one of the world’s major ports, a crucial hub for colonial shipping routes, the slave trade, and European emigration.  Then in the twentieth century the city became famous for cultural exports like The Beatles and, later, New Wave acts like Big in Japan, OMD, and Echo and the Bunnymen.  Two enormous, Cyclops-style windows at each end of the museum speak to the city’s unique history.  The north one looks into Liverpool’s city center, and the south one looks out into the world.

The Turner Contemporary

Photography by Jeffrey Kilmer

The cool, white, glass sheds that house the new Turner Contemporary in Margate, England are a surprising addition to this rough-and-tumble, seaside neighborhood, which is dotted with empty lots and abandoned buildings.  In fact the building, a home for contemporary art exhibits and education programs, sits on the site of an old rooming house where the great eighteenth-century English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner once lived and worked.  The new building, designed by English architect David Chipperfield, captures the delicate northern light and misty Margate seascapes so beloved by the painter with specially-oriented skylights and windows.  While the structure was conceived in homage to ethereal views and lighting, it’s strong and seaworthy.  It’s got high, broad galleries to properly show off large-scale contemporary painting and sculpture.  And it’s protected with a concrete plinth and opaque glass panels that have been designed to resist corrosion, humidity, and even the occasional overpowering wave.