Imperial War Musuem North The Imperial War Museum North (Fig. 4) was the first branch of the Imperial War Museums (IWM) to be opened outside of the Southeast, England and was designed by Libeskind (Baing, Andreas Schulze, & Wong, Cecilia. 2018). The trustees of the Imperial War Museum needed a space to house collections that were unable to fit in the other exhibitions, attract visitors to the north and wanted to build an iconic building that would be ‘a statement that people got excited about’ (Imperial War Museum North, Manchester. 2004). Although Libeskind’s aim for the IWMN was to tell the story of how war and conflict has affected the lives of those in Britain and commonwealth countries since 1914 (Studio Libeskind, 2020). Libeskind lost his own relatives during the holocost and his parents were holocost survivors, their lives being drastically changed during the second world war under the Nazi regime. Even after the war had ended, anti-seminitsm was still prevalent which then caused his parents to move to Israel in 1957 and then the US in 1965 (Marek, 2010). This would not be the first time Libeskind created a war museum as he is most known for another project, the Jewish Museum (Fig. 5) in Berlin, Germany (Niesewand, 1997).
Figure 5. Jewish Musuem Berlin, Germany. Photographed by Esakov (2010)
Figure 4. Imperial War Musuem North, photographed by Victor B (2020)
5.
