Plans for the long-awaited arts hub known as The Factory, the permanent home for the biennial Manchester International Festival, are moving ahead after Manchester City Council approved the scheme last week. The cube-shaped construction will be the first major UK commission for Rem Koolhaas’s OMA practice.
The hub for art, theatre, dance and music events will form part of the new St John’s neighbourhood, to be built on the site of the former Granada TV studios in the city centre. Manchester City Council will develop the scheme in partnership with the property investment company Allied London.
The UK government has pledged £78m towards the £110m cost of the project. Construction is due to begin this spring with the building scheduled for completion in 2020, a year later than originally planned. Richard Leese, the leader of the city council, says that the Factory “would make Manchester a genuine cultural counterbalance to London”.
Early last year, Maria Balshaw, the director of the city’s Whitworth Art Gallery and Manchester City Galleries, who is the “steering person” on the project, told us that The Factory Manchester will be a “multi-art-form centre, which can host large-scale exhibitions”. She compared the central performance space to the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London, adding that “the key is that The Factory will be super-flexible. It can be one large space or divided into eight small units, for instance”. Balshaw is shortly expected to be named as the new director of Tate.
The next edition of the Manchester International Festival (MIF) launches this summer (29 June-16 July). Mark Ball, currently the artistic director of the Lift arts festival, has been appointed as associate artistic director of MIF; delivering the Factory programme will fall under his remit.
