Hct15 akw savia palate

The Celebrity Building: Battersea Power Station

Savia Palate / MA HCT Architectural Association School of London

“The future ain’t what is should have been Seen better times But she always shine Battersea”, sings the band Super Furry Animals in their song Battersea Odyssey, perfectly describing the current condition of the once upon a time “temple of power”, the Battersea Power Station. Its prominent Art Deco design and its monumentality became the scene for many popular cultural mediums, either mentioned in songs or featured in TV shows, movies, music video-clips, and video games. The ubiquitous image of Pink Floyd’s cover photo for their album Animals, where a pig as zeppelin flies over the power station, devised an imaginary reality of the building at a point where other TV shows or movies used it instead of the real building. A lot of people argue that is probably the main reason the building is popular in London. Even at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic games in London, Battersea Power Station was presented as a 3D reproduction of Pink Floyd’s image.

Pink Floyd’s Cover Album

However, it is presumably valid to say that fame and money do not always strengthen one another, and Battersea Power Station specifically illustrates this disconnect. While its image became famous and vastly reproduced in the media, the station, after its closure in 1983, was solely a burden to the Central Electricity Generating Board as an enormous debt. The simultaneous caring praise and curse of being listed as a Grade II heritage site made the station’s regeneration immensely difficult. Its first design was the result of a popular typology at that time known as the brick-cathedral. The power station became the largest brick building in Europe and along with its qualification to have a unique Art Deco interior fittings and decoration constituted the preservation of the power station indispensable. Its design, apparently accrued from its over-determined function, was also the essential reason to remain a tangle of scaffolding and debris for so long. At a period where its function was already obsolete, and the tremendous amount of cost to adjustably reuse it, given a high level of pollution and a high level of destruction, constituted its inflexible typology an issue.

The roof of the ‘future’ Battersea Power Station. Even though today it does not exist, its redevelopment plan promises a garden roof with apartments, shops, and leisure activities.

The plan aspires to have a broader impact in the area.

Its regeneration was indeed an ‘odyssey’. Battersea Power Station, like another Penelope, patiently awaited changing owners and saw assertive and decisive investors with plans come and go. Maintaining its celebrity allure, even George Clooney, along with Chris Smith and Arnold Schwarzenegger, inaugurated plans in 1997 to transform the power station into a cinema, which again proved to be another unsuccessful scheme. Eventually in 2012, the new (and last?) owners of the power station announced a tremendously ambitious redevelopment plan. It is necessary to conceptualize its importance within other ongoing developments in the broader area, such as the new public tube extension and the Nine Elms Bridge, which along with the new Battersea development, might be a strategic move to shift the center of the city and have great implications on London’s urban fabric.

The promotion of the plan, which is going to be a complex of housing, leisure, and shopping, is an interesting story as well, since it follows the economy of its time based on reputation capital. There will be a world tour of thirteen cities in eleven countries to showcase the so-called new “village� of London. The aim is not only to find prospective owners for the housed but also to attract new global firms and market in London. Architecture as a branding instrument is mobilized with almost every image of the tour showing the power station as the protagonist of the plan.

In addition, starchitects like Norman Foster and Frank Gehry were recruited to contribute new buildings. One of the first owners is the famous British singer Sting and his wife, a prominent advertisement that went viral on the web to bolster the promotion even more, by primarily supporting the importance to preserve and renovate the power station. These strategic tools turned out to be very helpful since the project holds a record for the fastest selling property development since they managed to sell ÂŁ600m worth of flats in four days.

All of the images promoting the redevelopment plan show the Battersea Power Station as the protagonist. The power station is used as a branding tool to encourage investments.

One of the many protests that occurred over the years to protect the power station, its bad condition, and future plans that do not embrace a community driven approach.

Contestation over redevelopment is unavoidable, since many parties have their own dream for the iconic London landmark. However, Battersea Power Station was a disputed project since its establishment. Even though today is loved and protected by the Londoners, many protests occurred against its existence due to its polluting function and its infection ratio to the broader neighborhood. Today, while there is a lot of contestation on why the preference is on foreign investors instead of local, it goes without question that the main issue here is not about being foreign or not, but who actually can afford to buy a flat in such a place.

Nevertheless, before it goes denounced as another gentrification project – which, of course it is – its main problem is presumably the notion of scale analogous to time. The scale of the project is large enough to require a minimum of ten years to be completed. We live in an era of constant change and radical advances in a simultaneous multiplicity of sectors. Even though the popularity of the power station represents a good investment, both in terms of money and reputation capital, it would be interesting to look at the buyers’ intentions and how different they are from the developers’ and the state’s ambitions. A project like this designed in its entirety, in very particular forms, and at a very specific moment related to the broader urban fabric of London, might be already outdated until its full completion. Let us hope that this time its design is flexible enough to adjust to its future.