Platform souls: New plans for King’s Cross in London show the massive scale of the venture
The Guardian (London)
June 7, 2004
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
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.
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.
guardian.co.uk/glancey
Graceful substance . . . the new Gagosian Gallery. Below, the
interior, with Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost. Below right, a model of the
planned King’s Cross redevelopment
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
