1 Year of Modernist HQ
We can’t quite believe it, but it’s been a year since we opened our HQ in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. So much has happened over the last 12 months, exhibitions, events, the establishment of a reading room, copies Campari, a dog chewing our stairs, and that’s just for starters. As our devoted followers you will of course remember that we launched with a retrospective exhibition of the last decade of The Modernist magazine. So today, our blog post looks back at that exhibition, which opened to the public on 2nd May 2019.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
From Our Archives was the first exhibition in The Modernist Society’s new dedicated exhibition space at 58, Port Street. As 2019 was the 10th anniversary of the formation of the society, this exhibition featured some of the team’s favourite items from the organisation’s project archive.
A residency at Manchester’s ‘Toastrack’ unearthed original blueprints as well as photographs of staff and students dating back to its early days as the ‘Domestic and Trades College’ with fashion shoots on the roof and butchering courses in the kitchens.
A long standing love affair with the UMIST Campus led the Society to unilaterally declare it as a Conservation Area in 2012. The Society became ‘uninvited artists in residence’ at the Campus and after awarding ‘degrees’ from their own Modernist University they designed and planted plaques and created a map to honour the very best cluster of 1960s architecture in the city.
In 2011 the team came up with a daft idea of publishing a magazine. Thirty issues, five designers and hundreds of contributors later, all the issues of the modernist magazine were on displayed, and you were all asking to buy Issue 1, which wasn’t possible, until… now
