Sitting in his studio in Berlin one afternoon, the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind picked up a teapot (the only spherical object close by) and, after sealing it in a plastic bag, he dropped it out of the window. Libeskind had won the commission to design the Imperial War Museum North — to be located in Manchester, England — and the shattered contents of the plastic bag provided the inspiration for his design.1Libeskind’s dramatic style was in keeping with the birth of the ‘starchitect’ — architects who were beginning to achieve fame beyond the architectural world. The phenomenon had started to grip the public imagination in the late 1990s–early 2000s on the back of a number of iconic museums that were being built at this time. Many of these buildings were located in economically deprived or otherwise disadvantaged areas, and were created under the explicit brief of regeneration through tourism and inward investment.2 As such their designs needed to be extraordinary, capable of attracting global attention — and so the starchitect was born.The Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), a museum of modern and contemporary art, is the oft-quoted success story of this time. The building, located on the banks of the Nervión River in Bilbao, the cultural capital of the Basque country (in Spain), was designed by starchitect Frank Gehry. Since opening in October 1997, the striking design has attracted global tourism and helped to reinvigorate this post-industrial city to the extent that other regions and organisations looking for a boost have rushed to replicate the so-called ‘Bilbao effect’.3Libeskind’s teapot-inspired design was destined for the redevelopment of Salford Quays, Manchester, a similar waterside location in a previously industrial area. This was the chosen spot for a new outpost of the original Imperial War Museum (IWM), founded in 1917 in London. The IWM North would complement the other sites of IWM Duxford (1976), HMS Belfast (1978), and the Cabinet War Rooms (1984).Daniel Libeskind’s signature style is one of deconstructivism — a postmodern form of architecture that emerged in the 1980s. Architects of the deconstructivist movement looked to fragment and take apart a structure, then to manipulate and rebuild it with asymmetry, angularity and distortion — to experiment with the potential forms a building could take. The IWM North would house artefacts exploring those conflicts from WWI onwards involving Britain and the Commonwealth. The broken pieces of the teapot had helped Libeskind to conceptualise the building’s three distinct shards, each representing an arena of war: the Air Shard juts sharply into the sky; the Earth Shard assumes an expansive, curved shape; and the Water Shard provides a viewing platform onto the surrounding water. For Libeskind, it is a globe ‘shattered into fragments and then reassembled’.4 The three interconnected shapes are covered in aluminium, with sloping floors, leaning walls, and protruding plinths. The lack of natural light has been mitigated by random slashes of lighting tracks which project angular shadows across the space. These fragmentary and distorted features, contrasting forms and exposed materials, all features of Libeskind’s deconstructivist style, make the IMW North a disorientating space, allowing visitors to ‘feel the unsettling nature of war’.5 Here we have the architecture itself representing and making visible the theme and subject matter of the museum — namely, conflict.The IWM North is an object of interest in its own right. This has historically been the case, with museum architecture performing specific functions or conveying the sociopolitical and aesthetic contexts of the time. The 19th century saw a proliferation of museums, many of them replicating the architecture of Greco-Roman temples. In Munich, The Glyptothek (1830), designed to house King Ludwig I’s collection of ancient sculptures, by mimicking a temple, reinforced the idea of a museum as a civilised, sacred place of learning.6 In the 20th century, in a move away from tradition, modernist White Cube constructions, such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1929), gained prominence, with the idea that showy buildings should not distract visitors from the art contained within its walls. However, this nevertheless represents a clearly defined purpose for the museum building. At the beginning of the 21st century, as we have seen, the focus returned to the museum itself, with, for example, the Jewish Museum Berlin (2001) holding a viewing of the empty building before its permanent exhibition was installed.7Daniel Libeskind was also the architect of the Jewish Museum Berlin, where his distinctive style is evident. He incorporated a zigzag design with angled walls, concrete voids and narrow diagonal windows that cut through the façade. The museum building as object reinforces the story related by its contents: ‘Libeskind uses the voids to address the physical emptiness that resulted from the expulsion, destruction and annihilation of Jewish life’.8 As the son of Holocaust survivors, he says he ‘did not want simply to design a museum building, but to recount German-Jewish history’.9As for the IWM North, the museum opened its doors in 2002 and attracted one hundred thousand visitors within its first six weeks.10 In 2008, it was named as one of the top ten English buildings of the last one hundred years by the Rough Guide to England.11