Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Platform souls

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Platform souls

    Platform souls

    New plans for King's Cross in London show the massive scale of the venture.
    And the smart money - including that of New York art tycoon Larry Gagosian -
    is already moving in. By Jonathan Glancey

    Monday June 7, 2004
    The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1232857,00.html

    The hype surrounding the opening of the Gagosian Gallery in King's Cross,
    London, has been so great and the plaudits have been so glittering that I
    expected to find something very special indeed. Not, perhaps, a riposte to
    the Bilbao Guggenheim by Frank Gehry but a landmark building; an artistic
    adventure.

    The Gagosian Gallery proves to be a modest creation, housed in a former
    garage in Britannia Street, a rats' alley smelling of diesel and urine,
    scuttling across the Metropolitan and Circle underground lines as they
    rattle between Farringdon and King's Cross-St Pancras. Behind the gaunt
    facade, Larry Gagosian's architects, Caruso St John, best known for their
    New Art Gallery, in Walsall, which opened in 2000, have opened up bright,
    cavernous, concrete-floored, top-lit white spaces. These are particularly
    refined white spaces; they have something of a religious air about them, not
    least because on a weekday afternoon this private gallery is as quiet as an
    abandoned city church. A security guard sits like a piece of isolated
    artwork by the locked door, while bright young things potter about at a vast
    reception desk faced with important catalogues. A solitary, studious looking
    fellow surveys the brown and white Cy Twombly abstracts, which hang from the
    spotless white walls with a degree of respect owed to icons and statues
    elsewhere.

    None of this is a criticism of this new London art space, which is one of
    the best of its kind since Charles Saatchi's original gallery in St John's
    Wood, designed by the late Max Gordon. Caruso St John are among our most
    thoughtful architects, as careful with the process of building as they are
    with design. And, yet, for all its graceful substance, the gallery has
    something of a temporary air about it. Should the top end of the art market
    take a tumble between now and the completion of the Eurostar terminal at St
    Pancras in 2007, it would make a particularly fine restaurant, office or
    nightclub.

    The area will certainly want these as its redevelopment gathers pace over
    the next five years. Seedy for decades, King's Cross is fast-becoming a
    blue-chip investment for property developers. Quite how the promethean
    building works promised here will pan out is anyone's guess. For every
    impressive new civil engineering achievement, there will be routine chain
    stores; for every art gallery, a fast-food joint. Expect, in time-honoured
    English tradition, a mix of the sublime and the banal: the Gormenghast glory
    of St Pancras raised to fresh, pinnacled heights as Eurostar trains snake in
    and out on their three-mile-a-minute race to and from Paris with its cafes,
    restaurants, shops and art galleries. Penny-plain King's Cross station
    stripped of 1970s tat. Both stations are attended by millions of square feet
    of gleaming new offices, some 1,800 flats, dozens of shops, washed and
    brushed public spaces, three new footbridges over the Regent's Canal,
    restored historic buildings and, so the developers say, more art galleries.

    Advertiser links
    We Are The Future - Child Charities
    Raising funds to benefit boys and girls in war-torn cities....

    wearethefuture.com

    Children International - Sponsor a Child
    For only $18 a month, you can make a difference in the life...

    children.org

    Please Help Feed These Children
    For the past 8 years I have ministered to the children and...

    godslivingwordsministries.org
    This leviathan plan, announced last week, for the 67-acre area north of the
    Gagosian Gallery, has been prepared by a property consortium comprising
    Argent St George, Exel, London and Continental Railways. Allies and
    Morrison, immaculate Moderns, and Demetri Porphyrios, the most convincing of
    the Prince of Wales's school of classicists, have been appointed architects
    in charge of a development that, in scale at least, matches the heroic urban
    projects that shaped Victorian London. The £2bn project will take at least
    15 years to complete. It may yet be rejected by the mayor of London, who
    will surely find its tallest 19-storey towers too modest and its plan not
    sufficiently dedicated to the concerns of big business. It may yet be called
    in for public inquiry by the government, and either held up, heavily edited
    or abandoned while lawyers rack up prodigious fees.

    Whatever the process - the rise and fall of commercial and professional
    reputations, the jaw-dropping fees, the performance bonuses, pension
    top-ups, the gongs awarded and brown envelopes exchanged - King's Cross will
    surely be redeveloped on a titanic scale within the next 10 and 20 years.
    The dodgy young men, working-class street-walkers and middle-class
    kerb-crawlers will move on, along with the purveyors of kebabs, tattoos and
    grubby mags. Spick and span corporate offices, big-brand shops, chain cafes
    and relentless street furniture interspersed with well-meant public art will
    take their place.

    Architects of the calibre of Allies and Morrison and Demetri Porphyrios will
    do their best to raise the standards of St Pancras but they cannot hope to
    control the quality of the tenants who will flock here in coming years.
    There will be something like 30,000 new jobs here, while millions of
    passengers travelling to and from London and the Continent, and looking for
    diversion, will mill around King's Cross. A committed few might waft down
    New Britannia Street to pick up a canvas by Cy Twombly or a pickled lamb by
    Damien Hirst.

    Gagosian, however, ought to know what most people will want. This sharp,
    silver-haired Armenian-American, nicknamed "Go-Go", began making money in
    Santa Monica in the 1970s. "I would buy prints for $2-$3, put them in
    aluminium frames and sell them for $15," says the Donald Trump of the art
    world. If Gagosian likes art, he likes nothing better than closing deals. He
    opened a small gallery behind Regent Street a few years ago, also a
    conversion by Caruso St John, before homing in on King's Cross, which offers
    an optimum deal: a place to show big, headline-stealing artworks - tens of
    tons of Serra - in a handsome setting in the sort of grubby street that
    makes the art world trill with excitement, while making a quiet future
    killing on the property market.

    Gagosian likes art, and knows that this, with all its high society
    connections, brings kudos, glamour and outlandishly big bucks. Should you
    happen to be a wheeler-dealer who builds a fashionable gallery showing
    fashionable artists in one of the most fashionable up-and-coming parts of
    London, how can you possibly go wrong?

    Gagosian's gung-ho, yet outwardly, highly refined, venture into the London
    art world and King's Cross is, perhaps, to be preferred to the
    run-of-the-mill development that could take place here if we fail to keep a
    sharp eye on the area and the hugely ambitious "masterplans" dreamed up by
    one developer after the other over the past 15 years. No one should doubt
    that the real artwork here is the arrival of the high-speed Eurostar line.
    This, like the Midland Railway's grand Gothic entry into St Pancras some 140
    years ago, will change the face of the surrounding area, including Britannia
    Street, for ever.
Working...
X