Londons St. Pancras station has a new interactive art gallery
Written: 28th May, 2008
Waiting for the train is an art form at Eurostar's new London terminal, St. Pancras International. In its lofty, marble-floored departure area, passengers get their last taste of British cultural life before boarding the high-speed train to Paris or Brussels. Seated at glass-topped coffee tables that also serve as interactive computers, passengers can project images of masterpieces from London's National Gallery onto facing walls. On a recent afternoon, passengers were gazing at "The Ambassadors," painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1533. Another wall showed a flirtatious detail from the raucous "Marriage à la Mode" series by William Hogarth, the 18th century English artist.On still another wall, two screens display interactive Google Earth maps. You can virtually whiz along the train tracks of Europe, looking at cities, wandering through the French countryside and exploring the ski runs of the Alps. "We didn't want to trap people in the usual retail environment," said Richard Hill, Eurostar's brand and design manager.At the coffee tables, the computer controls are so discreet that they're easy to miss if you lay a newspaper or laptop on top. "It's a fantastic idea," said Margarite Hallssen of Iceland, who was on her way to Paris with her 10-year-old daughter, Alexandra. There's at least one drawback to the project, which premiered in April."If people miss their train because they're looking at pictures, in one sense, we'd be delighted," Hill said.
Source Los Angeles Times