Imperial War Museum - IWM North

M17 1TZ Manchester, Great Britain (UK)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2024):
The Imperial War Museum North was opened in Trafford, Greater Manchester, in 2002. It was the first branch of the museum outside southeast England, and the first to be purpose-built as a museum.
Designed by architect Daniel Libeskind, with Manchester-based architects Leach Rhodes Walker providing implementation services. The Imperial War Museum North was Libeskind's first building in Britain. Libeskind's building, overlooking the Manchester Ship Canal at Salford Quays, was based on the concept of a globe shattered by conflict into shards and reassembled. These shards, representing earth, air and water, give the building its shape.

Exhibitions
Permanent exhibitions are housed in the museum's first-floor main gallery space within the earth shard. These consist of a chronological display which runs around the gallery's 200-metre (660 ft) perimeter and six thematic displays in "silos" within the space. As part of the earth shard, the 3,500 m2 floor of the gallery is curved, gradually dropping away like the curvature of the Earth from a nominal "North Pole" near the gallery's entrance. Within this hall, described as cavernous and dramatic, a number of large artefacts are displayed; they include a Russian T-34 tank, a United States Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier jet and a 13-pounder field gun which fired the British Army's first shot of the First World War. Around the gallery, a number of vertical mechanical conveyors called "timestacks" display selections of smaller artefacts, some of which can be handled by visitors. Libeskind's subsequent work on the masterplan for renewal the World Trade Centre site is echoed in the exhibit of a 7 m (23 ft) section of twisted steel from that building.

In addition to the physical exhibits, the walls of the gallery space are used as screens for the projection of hourly audiovisual presentations called the Big Picture, which explore themes related to modern conflict. These presentations use up to 1,500 images from the Imperial War Museum's photograph archive and were originally projected from 60 synchronised slide projectors mounted throughout the space. In 2011 digital projectors were installed, allowing a greater degree of flexibility. The images are complemented by personal accounts from the museum's oral history sound archive. The Big Picture was devised after the reduction in the museum's budget forced the scrapping of the previous exhibition plan by designers DEGW and Amalgam. With some seeing one of the museum's shortcomings as a lack of artefacts, the projections and the building itself are now the main attractions.

Also within the earth shard, a separate gallery accommodates a programme of temporary exhibitions. These have included the Witness series of art exhibitions from the museum's collection, examining First and Second World War art, and the work of female war artists.

The WaterWay, a passageway linking the earth and water shards, is used for smaller art or photographic exhibitions, such as Ghislaine Howard's photojournalism-inspired painting series 365.

Outside the museum building, an ex-Iraqi Army T-55 tank was put on display at the main entrance in August 2008. This vehicle was captured by the Royal Engineers during the opening stages of the Iraq War in 2003.[33] The spot had previously been occupied by an Iraqi ZSU-23-4 Shilka anti-aircraft gun. Captured by the Royal Artillery after the 1991 Gulf War, it was moved from Imperial War Museum Duxford and displayed to mark the museum's fifth anniversary in July 2007.

Locations of  Imperial War Museum

Imperial War Museum - IWM London

Imperial War Museum - IWM Duxford

Imperial War Museum - IWM North

Churchill War Rooms

HMS Belfast

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