Trust those clever clogs in Liverpool, they’ve answered a question that’s been nagging away at me for years.
All those squiggles and splodges and slugs and splashes, all those spiralling boxes and tumbling dominoes, so clever, so beautiful, so very iconic, so very, very expensive.
Blinded by their halo, the light bouncing off the perspex cases that become the shrines holding the sacred relics of the sheeny shiny architect’s vision, and dazzled by the champagne and dazed by the adoration, the ritual, the incense, the sermons, the incantations of magical figures of visitor numbers, all in all you’re home and peeling the potatoes before the thought finally breaks through: “But what is it actually for?”
And hours later, putting out the bins, another one makes it to the surface: “What can you actually put in a squiggly splodge box except squiggly splodge-shaped objects?”
But in Liverpool, as so often, they’ve cracked it.
The stacked Kitkat fingers are rising on the dock, and the question has been answered. My mistake was envisaging myself inside looking in, or even outside looking in. That’s the sort of retrograde thinking that so often stifles genius. I should have been thinking about being inside looking out.
As Professor Phil Redmond explained, the fingers of Kitkat “will undoubtedly become one of the best vantage points in the city through a magnificent 80ft picture window”.
Once you see the whole thing as a £72m picture frame, so much becomes clear. Once the Tate has finished its Ziggurat, all they have to do is punch a hole through the turbine hall, through all those predictable floors of art, and there will be a radiant view of the Thames.
I’m a bit worried about the Museum of London though. Unless they demolish most of the Barbican, I just don’t see how they can get a decent view even of St Paul’s, still less of the City. They may have to do it the old-fashioned way and put lots of things into the space instead.
