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THE BIZARRE AND EXPENSIVE ART. Cont'd.
WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO TO UNDERSTAND THIS ART?
We'll keep the dead cow flying here
By
Jonathan Glancey
Photo:
Damien Hirst's Spot Mini in the entrance hall of the new Saatchi Gallery. Photo
credits: David Levene.
In 1908 the young architect Ralph Knott became the surprise winner of a competition to design a grand new home for the London county council. At the time, the LCC was camped out in sprawling accommodation in Spring Gardens near Trafalgar Square. Its members and officers were embarrassed by their ramshackle home, at a time when councils nationwide were indulging in magnificent city halls. No fewer than 152 entries were received for the competition, yet only Knott, a tailor's son from Chelsea and an assistant of Aston Webb - architect of Admiralty Arch, the east facade of Buckingham Palace and the principal galleries of the Victoria and Albert museum - met the all but impossible list of demands made by council officers. Along with offices and council chambers, the new County Hall was to house architects' studios, scientific laboratories, a library, canteens and the workshops of innumerable workaday local government departments. Many of the great and good architects who entered the competition found the LCC's demands impenetrable. "One was so in the dark as to what they wanted," complained Edwin Lutyens, the greatest British architect of the day, "the site so lovely, the conditions so difficult." Facing Barry and Pugin's magical neo-gothic Palace of Westminster across the Thames, County Hall really ought to have been a special building. Sadly, Knott's pompous and all but desiccated neo-baroque design was, and remains, a heroic disappointment. No one, though, can deny the quality of its construction. A labour of late-flowering Edwardian earnestness, County Hall was opened by King George V and Queen Mary in 1922, although Knott's building was not completed until 1933, by which time its architect was four years in his grave. The first world war put construction on hold, and even after peace broke out expenditure on such a lavish building was widely seen as gratuitous. The Great Depression only served to delay work on this enormous building.
The County
Hall complex continued to grow until 1974. New offices were needed when the LCC
gave way to the Greater London Council in 1965; the new body had wider powers,
geographically and politically, than its predecessor. Twelve years later, County
Hall was empty. Margaret Thatcher's 1980s governments had worked tirelessly to
demean local authorities and to centralise political power in Westminster - and
Ken Livingstone's overtly leftwing GLC stood for everything the Tories despised.
In its last days, County Hall was hung with a giant banner, facing the Palace of
Westminster, recording the number of unemployed in the capital. This was too
much for Thatcherite sensibilities; in 1986, in an unprecedented attack on local
democracy, parliament abolished the GLC. Poor old County Hall, by then a grade
II listed building, stood vacant until 1993. There was talk of it becoming a
university campus. Livingstone dreamed of winning it back for the putative
Greater London Authority. And in 1988 one of the developers chosen to propose
uses for the building recommended that Charles Saatchi occupy an arts centre in
one of the lower levels of the building. Saatchi, of course, was the ad man who
had done so much to help Thatcher to Downing Street and thus bring down "Red"
Ken Livingstone and the GLC. In the
event, Saatchi kept his collection in St John's Wood, in the north of the
capital, where it was housed it in a bright garage of a building designed by the
late Max Gordon. County Hall was finally bought for £60m in 1993 by the
family-owned Shirayama Shokusan Corporation, its seemingly infinite corridors
and committee rooms given over to a five-star Marriott hotel, a two-star Travel
Inn, the FA Premier League Hall of Fame, the London Aquarium, expensive flats,
the Namco Entertainment Centre, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and,
for the artistically minded, the Dali Universe. Now Saatchi has arrived in a big
way, leasing 40,000 sq ft of County Hall. It does seem an odd choice: hip, flip
Britart hangs out like a gang of sneering teenagers in grand, wood-paneled
corridors, offices and chambers that still speak of a trilby-hatted London,
capital of the world's largest empire. If, though, there is meant to be a
tension between architecture and art in these quietly refined halls, this never
quite comes off. Knott's interiors - imposing, vaulted, polished, refined things
of parquet floors and tunnel-like corridors - will not be bullied, even by the
most two-fingers-up young British art. You never get that
good-lord-there's-a-hippopotamus-in-the-drawing-room shock that you do in other
bravura art spaces such as the V&A's Cast Court, with its life-size replica of
Trajan's Column.
The article continues on the following pages.