In Luxembourg, they are finishing off their new cultural buildings, nicely in time to be Europe’s Capital of Culture next year. There’s the new Musée d’Art Moderne (Mudam) by IM Pei, he of the Louvre pyramid. There’s the virtuoso twin-chamber concert hall by Frenchman Christian de Portzamparc, its facade like a giant stringed instrument. These take their place in a £200m cultural quarter planned by Spain’s Ricardo Bofill, which also boasts a new convention centre. Nobody except bankers, steel magnates and Euro-politicians used to go to Luxembourg: they will now.
In 2008, the cultural baton passes from Luxembourg and Sibiu in Romania to Liverpool and Stavanger in Norway. There is a lot of new building going on in Liverpool, too, but, as in nearby Manchester, it’s nearly all commercial boom-time stuff. Some of this will be ready for 2008, but most of it only by coincidence, and very little of it specifically dedicated to culture. The difference, of course, is that Liverpool is in the UK, where grand, publicly funded cultural gestures are regarded with intense suspicion. Post-millennium, we prefer to leave building to private developers. We remember the Dome.
Liverpool has had a bad press on this, some of it deserved. It is certainly true that it messily abandoned the one landmark building it had planned for 2008 and which helped it to win the bid against many other British cities. This was Will Alsop’s Cloud building, also known as the Fourth Grace because of the way it would have stood alongside Liverpool’s existing “three graces” trio of imposing waterfront buildings. There was going to be a city museum in the Cloud, along with various other things everyone was always rather vague about. But with a price tag of £324m, the development scared off the public funders. Were they wrong? Architecture is not enough to cause cultural change.
Having been to Luxembourg to see the new buildings there, I’m not so sure we should rush to poke fun at messy old Liverpool. I like a bit of urban mess, me. In the Grand Duchy, the new cultural quarter represents a very sanitised, state-centralised, top-down vision of what constitutes cultural life. It’s magnificent, but to be honest it’s not much fun.
Of course, there is much more to the Capital of Culture year than this. In fact, Luxembourg has expanded the event to a complete region — including neighbouring parts of France, Belgium and Germany. There are some promising venues, too, including former steelworks and blast furnaces. They have an ambitious programme. This, too, shows up Liverpool somewhat, which is jealously keeping its event to itself. So the risk is that 2008 will be seen as more than a little parochial. But Liverpool doesn’t care tuppence for Luxembourg or any other cultural centre in greater Europe. What it wants to do is exactly what Glasgow did in 1990 — the last time a British city was Capital of Culture. Glasgow, with its cheery “Glasgow’s Miles Better” slogan, managed to reverse its bad image and has never looked back.
In Luxembourg, meanwhile, they have no bad image to reverse, beyond the one of being a slightly dull corner of Euroland. Well, have you ever stayed there? Thought not. It’s not Paris, is it? As Robert Garcia, co- ordinator of the 2007 programme, told me slightly ruefully, the biggest visitor attraction, by numbers, in his tiny state is the service station on the trans- European motorway. So you can see why they might want a world-class modern art gallery and concert hall.
Pei has certainly delivered architecturally, though Mudam contains no surprises for anyone who knows his geometric obsession. You can spot the Louvre-ish bits, you can even find echoes of the grand summerhouse he built for clients in Wiltshire. It is beautifully built — indeed, some of the best-detailed stone and steelwork I’ve ever seen. It rises from the foundations of one of Luxembourg’s many ruined castles. The trouble is, it doesn’t have much of a collection. The curators are desperately commissioning new art to fill it. The opening show, Eldorado, is a jumble sale of a thing. There’s the odd Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow, and the inevitable Bruce Nauman video (not his best), and a great deal of junk. I saw a much stronger display in an existing, shoestring-budget gallery in town, the Forum d’art Contemporain, in the building that’s known as the Casino Luxembourg.
Just up the hill from Pei’s junk-art receptacle, De Portzamparc’s concert hall sits slightly self-consciously among brutal 1960s Euro-bureaucracy buildings. This is a marvellously warm concert hall with very chill foyers around it, all contained by a forest of slender, white-painted steel columns. These diffuse the daylight successfully (and screen out those regrettable buildings outside), but they are rather overwhelming, even threatening, to be around: it’s as if you’d just been swallowed by a giant whale.
Over on the other side of the city, two former railway roundhouses — not so very different from London’s equivalent arts venue of that name — are being spruced up to house 2007 events. These feel a lot less impersonal than the new cultural acropolis and could well prove the surprise hit of the festival. So: will Liverpool have anything to match this overall mix of facilities? Well, Liverpool has the sublime mid-19th-century neoclassical palace of St George’s Hall, for instance, which has undergone a big renovation for 2008. The small concert room in the complex — where Dickens once gave readings — will be a key venue. And then, down on the waterfront, the cultural programmers have to decide what to do with the vast King’s Waterfront arena and conference centre, designed by Stirling prizewinners Wilkinson Eyre. They’ll use it, all right; by happy chance it is due to be ready at the start of 2008, and the arena can be divided up in various ways up to its maximum capacity of 10,000.
Of course, Liverpool already has a cluster of world-class museums and art galleries. Only one fly in the ointment there: part of the group, the popular Museum of Liverpool Life, closed last month. Following the Cloud debacle, there is now a new design for a £65m Museum of Liverpool, won in competition by Danish architects 3XN. That will be the city’s new icon building, at the Pier Head, right in the middle of the waterfront World Heritage Site. Ah, but it will not open until 2010.
Whoops.
