G2: Architecture: 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 Guardian – United Kingdom
Jun 07, 2004
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 pounds 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