ART OF THE MATTER
Retail developers are increasingly turning to high design and public art to distinguish their properties and instil a place. David Taylor reports.
In Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and her Sisters the pompous, tortured Soho artist Frederick, played by Max Von Sydow, is infuriated when a potential purchaser of one of his paintings judges it by size rather than quality. It is, he feels, utter philistinism, writ large. Artists who create works for the public domain must often feel a bit like this, too, when they are asked to produce a particular piece for the entrance to an otherwise artless shopping centre that has already been designed.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The retail developer and asset management specialist Milligan and the developer Hammerson are working, in their separate ways, to integrate works of artists at as early a stage as possible alongside architects and the rest of the team in the retail environments they create. In return, they are achieving thriving centres with real character and differentiation in a world where operators are seeking to avoid clone high streets or malls filled with the usual suspects.
So, Milligan first. The five-year-old company set up by John Milligan, the former international director of Jones Lang LaSalle, is so committed to utilising the best aspects of public art that it has decided to sponsor the 2007 Turner Prize, held for the first time this year at Tate Liverpool from October to January. It will be a trailblazing event for the city in the run up to its designation as European Capital of Culture, and Milligan sees it as a way of “exploring the potential for culture, commerce and creativity to come together to create inspiring and exciting retail spaces”.
This kind of exposure does not come cheap – the sponsorship deal amounts to £75,000 – but the firm is thrilled to be the only corporate proving its artistic credentials in this way.
John Milligan says that the firm’s key aim is to create “inspiring and exciting spaces”, reaching out to people via an exploration of links between design, art and fashion. But the Liverpool connection is also apposite as Milligan has integrated work from aspiring and established artists into the fabric, design and feel of the Metquarter in the city. There, it commissioned local art students and practitioners in a team led by the former Turner Prize nominee and academic Mel Chantrey, Milligan’s “creative adventurer”, and Paul Hanegraaf, its “creative navigator”.
Metquarter’s artistic elements are many and varied but all are intended to shape the “very comfortable urban room” and give it local character. The interior space was designed as a room or gallery, featuring a suspended, modular, flat sculpture by Chantrey. It floats above the room and acts as a focus for projections, bringing “theatre”, while a series of soft and elegant 30ft lanterns bring to mind the feminine aspects of fashion. Chantrey collaborated with Hutchfield Furniture to create a curvilinear ribbon of seating and tables including six pink chaise longues; with Manchester Metropolitan University to produce the Amber Project – amber polycarbonate casters encasing buttons, feathers, jewellery and other items that were inserted into column bases; and with the designers Stage One to create Wishing and Kissing Trees – Christmas installations made from 5,000 stainless steel coat hangers held together with tiny red and green plastic strips.
Other features include sculptural protective bollards, a leather-clad reading table and MetGate, another Chantrey-designed work that doubled as a security gate for the scheme’s Victoria Street entrance café.
A measure of Metquarter’s resultant success is the footfall figures, even in a time of difficult access owing to the rest of the building work going on around the centre. Plus the fact that, despite early concerns, shoppers have respected the high quality, unusual items inside. “If you give them something of their own then they will look after it,” says Hanegraaf.
Other signs that Milligan has something special on its hands are the fact that retailers such as Diesel, Hobbs and Kurt Geiger have responded with specially designed stores and that large numbers of shoppers are returning; and, importantly, that there is a community sense of ownership.
But Milligan is not resting on its laurels: MetThink, a group of Liverpool-based movers and shakers such as fashion designers, publishers and graphic designers, is making sure that the thing does not get stale. “Just about everything we could touch, we challenged,” says Hanegraaf.
The same team has been busy in Manchester, too, creating with architect Aedas a highly sculptured retail environment for the airport’s Terminal 1regeneration project, and working with Benoy and Mark Morgan to create a Sky Bar in the central court of the city’s Triangle retail centre.
The airport scheme in particular is a study in ordered thinking and a “narrative”, with the project set to usher anxious and stressed travellers first through a “consumer journey”. First, there is a calming, understated zone, then one stocked with necessities, then desirable items in the high-end fashion zones, and finally food. On the way, says Hanegraaf, the traveller will be able to sit in low, specially designed furniture including undulating, sculptural forms designed by Chantrey to take large numbers of people. This was designed using a budget set aside for standard furniture elements. Travellers will also see a café clad in bespoke diamond shapes in glass-reinforced plastic, the result of another series of design sessions and intensive modelmaking.
Hanegraaf is clear that the main thing in all of this is that art must not be an afterthought, but should be “about going back to the creative process and enriching it with art and craft alongside the creative process, so that things are fundamental to the conceptual order of the buildings we do – they are part of their soul.”
True, Metquarter did cost “a touch more”, concedes Hanegraaf, but this new organic approach is here to stay, especially with its quick payback and the realisation that a brand has been created, not simply a retail zone. “It was very worthwhile, and we can moderate that additional expense if we can get in a little earlier.”
Ultimately, it is difficult to be completely scientific about the extra, added value that integrating public art can bring to a project, but both Hammerson and Milligan are finding that quality, not merely quantity, is making a difference.”
Even Woody Allen’s artist friend might approve.