London Power Station
London’s iconic Battersea Power Station, once dismal and menacing enough to grace Pink Floyd’s Animals, is one step closer to an ambitious rebirth as massive, eco-friendly mixed-use development by Rafael Viñoly. The $8.2 billion plan will include 3,700 homes, 1.6 million square feet of office space, and 500,000 square feet of retail, ringing the power plant in undulating, terraced waves. The power station itself will get a stylish green roof and a shopping arcade inside; a new, carbon-free power plant will be buried below it, but it’s unclear exactly what, or how.
The plant, empty since its closure in 1983, is a historic landmark in the U.K.–and an endangered one, making English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk list and the World Monuments Fund’s Most Endangered Sites list. It’s a beautiful, art deco behemoth (the biggest brick building in Europe) but its also slowly falling apart, and a series of redevelopment attempts over the last two decades have gone nowhere. Viñoly’s plan weathered its share of criticism too, mostly centered around an early scheme that included a thousand-foot-tall “eco-tower” or, more oxymoronically titled “eco-chimney.”
