Battersea Power Station

This is the new design proposal for Battersea Power Station in London. The building itself is a listed building but has ran into a state of disrepair having not been in use for many decades. Strangely the new proposal includes relaunching the building as a steam power station.

'The four-chimney silhouette of the power station, which became an icon when it featured on Pink Floyd's 1977 Animals album, will be rivalled by a new, much taller chimney rising 300m as part of a vast plastic "eco-dome" covering a 19 acre office campus on neighbouring land.

A cross between a Centerparcs holiday resort and the Eden Project in Cornwall, the eco-dome aims to reduce energy consumption in the office buildings it contains by 67% compared to conventional offices. The chimney will draw cool air through the offices so there will be no energy hungry air-conditioning units.

On neighbouring sites there will be 3,200 new homes. The power station's twin turbine halls will become shopping arcades and the roofless boiler room will be planted as a park. The new power plant will be buried beneath a six-acre park and connected to two of the chimneys.

"This will be a power station for the 21st century sitting alongside Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's building and supporting a truly sustainable, zero-carbon development," said Rob Ticknell, who is managing the development for Treasury Holdings.

The developers claimed that once complete in 2020 around 7000 people will live on the site, some in apartments within the power station, others in neighbouring blocks of flats and a few in apartments wrapped around the eco-dome's chimney.

The designs have been masterminded by Uruguay-born architect Rafael Vinoly and are the third major attempt bring the Grade II*-listed power station back into use since the turbines stopped turning in 1983. A plan to turn it into an amusement park was launched by Margaret Thatcher but collapsed when the developer, Sir John Broome, ran out of funds. Between 1993 and 2006 the site was controlled by Parkview, a company owned by Hong Kong property tycoon Victor Hwang who envisaged shops, 40 restaurants and bars, thousands of apartments and a multiplex cinema. He sold the site largely untouched but at a profit.

Amid the failed plans, the building has fallen further into disrepair and is now listed as in "very bad" condition on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk register. The chimneys are in such bad condition that they must be demolished and rebuilt, the scheme's architects admit.

"Battersea Power Station needs to be saved," said Rafael Vinoly. "Buildings like this have a virtue of becoming part of the collective consciousness and this is very beloved in Britain. Our approach has to be to produce a development plan that can fund that."'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jun/20/art.architecture

The plans look fantastic but perhaps in the current economic state this may not take shape for a long time. It would be a brilliant way of restoring such an iconic building and it would regenerate the area phenomenally. It remains to be seen whether these ambitious plans do go ahead.