Working with the London Theatre Company and 59 Productions, architects HaworthTompkins have created Lightroom, a unique entertainment space in Kings Cross, London. At heart, the concept is simple. A four-storey black-cube space with a vast grid of high definition projectors, mapping a purpose-made video over the four walls and carpeted floor.

In essence it is simply a twist upon the same cinematic projection that has been going on for over 130 years, now using the internal architecture as screen. On close inspection, the internal architecture is even quite rough, an arrangement of stretched panels, concrete slabs, and breeze blocks with varying textures and quality of finish. Not that this matters, because the constant flow of moving image renders the surface obsolete, those imperfections disappearing into the texture of the artworks and animations spreading throughout the space.


The arrival into the space is part of its subsuming reveal. Not only is it seemingly dug into the very foundations of the otherwise standard New London Vernacular building within which it is housed, but there are a series of thresholds visitors must pass before finding themselves looking into the vast projection space. A series of descending steps and passages are disorientating as the polished veneer of Coal Drops Yard is left outside and above. This serves to add a sense of otherness to the cinematic space, which will no doubt find extra value beyond the artistic: it seems a readymade for commercial hire, product launches, and festival or fashion week events which also seek to add an aura and technological spectacle to their commercial offer.


The venue opens with an immersive David Hockney experience, Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away),. It is a video installation sitting between exhibition, documentary, spectacle, and moving image artwork – often not entirely sure which it is most interested in being. Sometimes, this ambiguity lets the work down: sequences where Hockney’s art makes most curatorial and impactful sense within the space – such as the Palm Springs light-filled paintings, or his moving image study of four seasons of the same Yorkshire rural road – are presented all too briefly when, if it were more of an art context, a viewer may wish to dwell much longer within the experience.

Instead, the film rapidly jumps through a series of chapters, seemingly desperate to include as much as possible even at the risk of turning often poetic artworks into barely graspable Tik-Tok length moments. It flits between playful animated sequences, behind-the-scenes process, hagiographic autobiography, and spectacle, but doesn’t seem to know which mode it wants to concentrate on.


There are, however, some poetic motifs and ideas within the fragmented documentary style. Underlying ideas of perspective, collage, looking, being immersed in a scene, and the relationship of technology to art practice recur in the various chapters of the film. These are of course all elements of Hockney’s six and a half decades of work as an artist who relentless has persued the relationship of digital and analogue, played with technology right through to recent iPad drawings, and who has personally researched and explored the history of camera obscura in painting history, but also speak to the specifics of Lightroom, its modes of display and immersive reception.

While some of the sequences seem forced or a bit weak – with no clear delineation between Hockney’s original work and latterly-added animation or process – seem for spectacle and to make most use of the moving image on all five surfaces, other sections sing. A number of cameras affixed to the roof of Hockney’s open-top car follow his journey through the “squiggly” roads of the Los Angeles hills.

The voiceover, which is Hockney throughout and formed of archive interviews as well as new recordings for this work, tells of how the grid of Santa Monica gives way to the projected twisted path, and as he discusses how he found exactly the write moment to start playing Wagner’s Die Walküre so the musical crescendos marry those of the journey, moments of the it play within the space as part of Nico Muhly’s durational score.

There is the oft-repeated myth that when the Lumière brothers first showed L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, the audience leapt from their seats and fled the screening as the projected train trundled towards them. In the 21st century, we have perhaps lost the ability to be genuinely shocked by technology, saturated as we are by it throughout our daily lives, beings, and identities. But it can still find new ways to create relationships or ways of seeing and thinking.


Future artists who will get to play with the space in the same way as Hockney and his studio have not yet been announced and so the potential of the space has yet to be discovered – the documentary approach favoured here is only one way of utilising the architecture and technology, and it clear that various creatives could explore other avenues through the inclusion of installation, scent, sound, performance or other ways of augmenting the raw ingredients.

There is a fascinating melting of architectural surface and applied digital artwork which could become an interesting playground for a variety of creatives, and while HaworthTompkins’ architecture takes a discreet back seat to the technological prowess and illuminated artworks, it is a critical component from arrival space to stage set which creates the conditions for escape.