Liverpool Slavery Museum relaunches competitors following Adjaye’s exit

The museum is in search of a recent architect to rework the Worldwide Slavery Museum and the neighbouring Maritime Museum, which each occupy a Grade I-listed former warehouse referred to as the Hartley Pavilion on Liverpool’s historic waterfront.

The now £58 million challenge – which is topic to exterior funding – will enhance exhibition areas and circulation throughout the 2 museums whereas additionally creating a brand new neighborhood area and entrance to the Worldwide Slavery Museum contained in the neighbouring Grade I-listed Martin Luther King Jr Constructing, which will likely be related to the Hartley Pavilion by a first-floor pedestrian bridge.

The transfer comes a month after NML mentioned it had determined to terminate the contract with Adjaye Associates and was now trying to launch an ‘accelerated’ seek for a brand new architect to steer the job.

Adjaye Associates gained the celebrated challenge in June last year and had been working with Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which had been appointed by way of a separate tender for the exhibition design and continues to work on the scheme.

The practices beat bids by Haworth Tompkins with JA Initiatives, Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, and Heneghan Peng Architects with Droo Architects to win the commission, worth an estimated £1.75 million on the time.

In accordance with the contract discover, the alternative for Adjaye will work with NML’s challenge supply crew, inner and exterior stakeholders and neighborhood teams to ‘co-produce, form and develop the challenge by closing out RIBA Stage 3 and guiding the challenge via RIBA Phases 4-7.’

NML’s resolution to retender the function part-way via the design course of comes two months after Adjaye was accused of sexual misconduct by three girls in a collection of allegations starting from harassment to sexual assault.

The allegations, which Adjaye denies, have been printed by the Monetary Instances following a 12 months lengthy investigation. Within the wake of the FT’s article, numerous purchasers have cancelled Adjaye Associates-designed tasks and the Gold Medal-winner has resigned from a number of advisory roles.

In an announcement justifying its actions, NML mentioned that, whereas the earlier crew had delivered ‘satisfactorily’ as much as RIBA Stage 3, ‘our authorized advisors knowledgeable us that the dangers to the challenge of continuous the present contract have been too excessive, and so the choice was taken to terminate’.

The assertion added: ‘The broader challenge stays reside and work is continuous in all different areas.’

Earlier this 12 months – and earlier than the allegations in opposition to Adjaye have been printed – it emerged that Adjaye’s apply and Nigerien architect Mariam Kamara have been not concerned in NML’s proposed public realm transformation of close by Canning Dock.

The duo have been one half of a quartet of practices chosen to work on the important thing waterfront scheme at Canning Dock in 2021, the opposite two being Asif Khan Architects and Theaster Gates, the designer of final 12 months’s Serpentine Pavilion.

NML was created within the mid-Eighties and is answerable for plenty of venues throughout town, together with a number of museums specializing in maritime historical past and the transatlantic slave commerce, clustered near the enduring Three Graces and Albert Dock. 3XN and AEW Architects accomplished the £68 million Museum of Liverpool on Mann Island for NML in 2011.

The price of NML’s Slavery Museum challenge is now estimated to have crept as much as £58 million from the earlier estimate of £57 million, with the newest design contract valued at between £0.8 million and £1.1 million.

In accordance with the present discover, NML’s ‘ambition is to create a brand new venue of the Martin Luther King Jr and Hartley Pavilion buildings and the 2 museums they home, that enables each to flourish and obtain NML’s imaginative and prescient for them.

‘This transformation will likely be led by our communities in a co-production method that may outline how we develop our imaginative and prescient. We’ll do that via refurbishing and creating the MLK as a devoted area for the Worldwide Slavery Museum and its communities with a link-bridge into re-interpreted galleries throughout the Hartley Pavilion.

‘Alongside this, we are going to re-interpret the Maritime Museum, which can also be housed within the Hartley Pavilion and guarantee it achieves its imaginative and prescient as one of many key museums in NML, and create a brand new, open and extra accessible venue for industrial functions.’

Bids will likely be evaluated 65 per cent on high quality and 35 per cent on value.