Libeskind's war museum triumphs over cost-cutters

The architects of the cash-guzzling Millennium Dome were given an object lesson in what can be achieved without handouts yesterday when the doors opened on Salford's spectacular Imperial War Museum North, which has been built with not a penny of lottery money.

The Imperial War Museum was so certain of a £20m hand-out to add a much-needed Northern outpost to its four establishments in the South-east that it formed a working group with the Heritage Lottery Fund in the mid-Nineties. But to its astonishment, it was told in December 1997 that capital projects such as the Dome had soaked up too much lottery money and that smaller, revenue-funded projects were the order of the day.

Daniel Libeskind, the project's architect – whose Jewish Museum building in Berlin exacted such an emotional response when built that many said it could exist without exhibits – had to be told to cut his budget by more than a quarter.

The land available to Libeskind was also reduced by 10 per cent and he was even forced to clad his building in cheaper material – aluminium, instead of concrete. But the architect claimed with some justification yesterday that the cost-cutting had enhanced the effort.

"The greatest challenge for the architect is to produce the maximum of architecture in the minimum of space," he said. "It's the simplicity, the robustness, that counts."

Certainly, few could see how concrete, rather than metal, might have delivered a better effect on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal.

The metal is twisted into three brutal, interlocking shards, based on the structure of a sphere shattered into fragments, to reflect conflict on earth, in the air and on water. It also settles the £28.5m museum into its landscape at Trafford Park – the world's first industrial park and powerhouse of British war production in the Forties – which was pounded by the Luftwaffe.

Inside, metal curvatures are designed to disorientate and disturb as they offer two routes through the core of the building from its bunker-like entrance. One leads to a cavernous gallery space where banks of concealed projectors will convey the visual sense of war by beaming 120 million feet of cine film through 360 degrees on to the 40ft-high walls. The other route from the bunker leads visitors to ride the earth shard, taking a zinc-clad lift up a perimeter wall angled slightly to a viewing platform 95ft above the lottery-funded Lowry Centre, across the canal. The lift shaft will be subject to wind, rain and snow, giving those who ride it the sense of aerial warfare and the precariousness of life below.

Touch-screen interactivity, as found in the Dome, is nowhere in sight, though one of the neatest curatorial touches is a series of "time stacks" – mechanical retrieval systems that fetch down trays of objects for visitors to handle.

There are dozens of exhibits to touch, from a Luftwaffe sports vest to the cricket bails used in a match between two British war brigades in 1944.

Quite what a draw all this will be for children is unknown – the museum insisted yesterday it was tied into the national curriculum, which most teenagers will consider a good reason to avoid the place. But with the other four branches of the Imperial War Museum in the South-east, the 300,000 visitors a year the new base reckons on should be achievable.

Even the search for corporate sponsors has been hard because most in the region are signed up to this month's Commonwealth Games. But in the end, an old-fashioned £3m fund-raising campaign chaired by the former BBC war correspondent Kate Adie helped meet the final costs. Now there's a second building phase on the table, including the auditorium Libeskind had to ditch four years ago.