Description
Book SynopsisAn insight into the refurbishment of Manchester's Town Hall Extension and Central Library, through large-format photographs
Trade Review"The result is a book - published as Central Library reopens to the public - which is not a dry account of a construction project, but instead an artistic appreciation of this Romanesque wedding cake of a building at a momentous point in its history. It combines archive photography with still life studies of books, furniture and clutter. There are lovely little details such as the list of items found during renovation of the readers' tables, including an unfinished essay on James I, an Orange Club biscuit and sweet and crisp wrappers spanning several eras."
Howard Bradbury, Cheshire Life, May 2014
"beautifully printed, elegantly designed"
(Owen Hatherley, Icon Magazine, 01/08/2014)
Based around a series of photographs taken and found by artists Dan Dubowitz and Alan Ward during the refurbishment of Manchester’s Central Library and Town Hall Extension, it is a huge, beautifully printed, elegantly designed...album.
As a piece of design and architectural exploration, Citizen Manchester is exemplary – contemporary without being grinningly Blairo-modernist, focused on history without heritage kitsch, local without being petty, serious without being scholastic.
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Table of Contents1. Special projects
2. Wisdom is the principal thing
3. I was born... in the crime section
4. Worshipping at the altar of process
5. Dangerous buildings
6. Concilio et Labore
7. Coleridge at 44
8. Crisis in heaven
9. What would Vincent Harris do?
10. Vincent Harris, Stanley Jast and Charles Nowell
11. The Project
12. Echoes
13. Main Contractor
14. Sub-contractors / One Team
15. Apprentices
Artists’ acknowledgements
