Feature: Installation art - pop-up buildings - The Electric Hotel - Goods Way, Gasholder No 8

Published: 17 June 2010
by JOSH LOEB

AS if the fairground rides – the London Eye and giant slides in the Tate Modern – weren’t surreal enough, it now seems that our city is being taken over by pop-up buildings.

In Dalston last year a giant, fully-functioning mill and cornfield rose in a brownfield wasteland as part of an artistic experiment courtesy of The Barbican. 

Last month, opposite Finsbury Park station, The Silver Bullet – a so-called pop-up bar that relocates every seven months like some itin­erant mollusc – material­ised overnight. 

And last week in the King’s Cross Railway Lands, dancers in a fly-by-night hotel entertained an audience as part of a show produced by Sadler’s Wells.

The Electric Hotel was due to be taken down this week, but popular demand means the show’s run has been extended to June 26.

King’s Cross development manager Anna Strongman, who works for Argent, the company that won the right to overhaul the area in 2007, said the four-storey building had been flung up in a couple of days.

“We’ve had some interesting comments from our contractors,” she says. “We have these long-term programmes and we’re always going on about how long it’s going to take, and then this building was created in a weekend. We got loads of emails saying, ‘My god, if you can build that that quickly, get on with the rest of the project!’”

The show, described as like something out of a David Lynch film, tells of what happens when a woman who was involved in an unspeakable incident that destroyed the reputation of the Electric Hotel returns to the cursed building. 

“It’s very much a show about transition and voyeurism,” says Ms Strongman. “Artists find it really stimulating working in a changing environment like the Railway Lands and they pick up on all kinds of themes around change, process and transformation.”

Director David Rosenberg says: “We started working with the idea of a block of flats, because we wanted to look more into people’s private lives and also look into spaces where people inhabited in a way that was different from the workplace.”

He added that having separate rooms allows the performers to present self-contained sub-plots to the audience.

Argent is currently searching for a new artistic director to oversee future productions and art events. “We’ve run a series of events on the site already for the last two years,” says Ms Strongman. “Last year we did a show called Scattered Crowd with Sadler’s Wells. The choreographer, William Forsythe, took over one of the buildings on the site and filled it with helium balloons.”

Argent say the new artistic director must have creative flair, a broad understanding of artistic trends, teamwork, experience and a “can-do attitude”. To apply visit www.kingscrosscentral.com/curatorcompetition 

• The Electric Hotel is at Goods Way, King’s Cross, Gasholder No 8, NW1, nightly at 9.45pm until June 26. For tickets call 0844 412 4300