Lexicon

lexicon made by Goldsmiths colledge students

This year, the ‘Geographies’ course chose to look at St. Pancras Station, the new home of
Eurostar in King’s Cross, as its collective investigative project. We chose this in the mistaken
belief that we would find there a hub of globalisation in all its levels; tourists and business
people streaming back and forth from the European continent and representatives of all the
technologies of control such as police, customs and immigration etc’. We thought that in St.
Pancras the work of architecture and spatial organisation would unfold in front of our eyes
bringing together the manifold layers of a dense urban environment. We thought that the
contradictions between the social complexity of a migrant area in which transience, drugs
and prostitution were some of the major contemporary economies and the glittering new
design for the housing of travel and mobility, would result in a spatial texture that was new
and unfamiliar.

What we actually found was very different. St. Pancras which seemed initially to embody
the dynamics of what is currently Europe’s largest urban regeneration project, a huge
building site that will envelope the entirety of the West side of King’s Cross, found us its
critical investigators, at a loss for words. How to break down its seamless, monolithic logic of
development ? How to see through its opacity and the interwoven density of its control and
surveillance mechanisms ? How to understand the self staging of ideal consumption ? How
to puncture the fantasy of cosmopolitan and privileged travel ? What to do with the context
of another environment that was being effaced as we went about our investigations ?

more on this : http://geographies.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/lexicon3.pdf