Private View: Friday 21 February 1997, 5:00PM

Exhibition Run: 22 February 1997 - Sunday 2 March 1997

Curated by Catherine du Toit, Peter Thomas and Richard Wentworth

Second and third year students from London’s Architectural Association have been digging about in King’s Cross. “… temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcasses of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks… a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.” That was Dickens describing the coming of the railroad to the area in Dombey and Son 150 years ago. It could also be King’s Cross now, as it anticipates another grand arrival — the railway to Europe.

Such large scale projects breed statistical data on passenger flow, consumer habits and economic viability which “grasp the material of our everyday practices, but not their form; or the ‘phrasing’ produced by the bricolage and discursiveness which combine them” (to quote from de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life) “Statistical inquiry ‘finds’ only the homogeneous”. The exhibition is presented in the form of a large model of the railway lands. It combines a reading of the domestic, commuter and industrial phrases ingrained in the gritty material reality that is King’s Cross, with the writing of visionary briefs for her imminent future.

Drawing on Tschumi’s typological displacements — crossprogramming and disprogramming — and applying the principles of Roget’s Thesaurus to generate a discourse between context and definition, generalisation and particularisation, students of Sector VI make public their work in progress. Work concerned with possibilities of a 25 year architectural urbanism; a provisional, particular urbanism of lightweight economies and precarious scales.

I love KX is a collective work investigating the abstract relations among things, space, the material world, the intellect, volition and the palimpsest of our affections by Chiara Bersi Serlini, Nicholas Boas, Sam Britton, Reem Charif, Matthew Collins, Martha Giannakopoulou, Takako Hasegawa, Aud Koht, Martand Khosla, Alex Lau, Yoash Oster, Remco Rolvink and Greg Sheng.

The exhibition has been made possible through the support of the artists from Cubitt Gallery, as part of an ongoing educational remit. Cubitt remains dedicated to bringing contemporary artistic practice to the heart of the city in this, their third King’s Cross home in the past five years. I love KX is curated by Catherine du Toit, Peter Thomas and Richard Wentworth, Sector VI @ the Architectural Association. Typographic and digital assistance from Andrew Gibbs and Geoffrey Makstutis.