Project: Lost Exchange
Featured in the publication: Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age - Wiley Academy 2001 - Ian Abley and James Heartfield.
Engineer: Jane Wernick
Up to the year 2000 - Liverpool and Birkenhead was an area in economic decline and uncertainty. Regeneration strategies and groups had started to promote the region with its future potential from its industrial past.
The Lost Exchange proposal was the introduction of a bridge from Liverpool leading to a new development on the then redundant industrial site on the ‘Landing’ Birkenhead side. The proposal was to stimulate new economic growth in a declining area desperately needing attention by introducing the idea that a bridge is an ‘Icon - Economy - Reactivator’ - a symbol of old, present and new Liverpool, driven by a new confidence of social and technical reinvention. The essence of the project is one of ‘hope and optimism’, looking forward in time with an understanding of the past - an element of inhabited infrastructure.
There are three programmatic bridge hangers representing past, present and future Liverpool as an economic sequence leading into a new cityscape at Birkenhead; a representation of design-led technological innovation and an eagerness to regain lost industrial markets - or ‘Lost-Exchange’. This strategy is bold and is based on the manufacturing principle ‘innovate or die’. The prime objective is to build a ‘job accelerator’, not in the then new superficial service sector of employment, which has replaced life-blood industrial activity, but to regain industrial markets and secure new markets of technological exchange.
The project takes along-term and powerful view of the social, cultural, technical and economic regeneration of Liverpool and Birkenhead.
Thanks to:
- Liverpool Architecture and Design
- Liverpool Vision
- Liverpool Planning Department
- Wallasey Regeneration
- Hamilton Quarter
- Architectural Association
- Department of Trade and Industry
- The Metropolitan Borough of Wirral Council - Planning & Economic Development Department
- The Royal Institution of Naval Architects - London
- Patrick Turnbull - Turnbull Engineering - Sunderland