Tag Archives: architecture

Mark Saunders talks at reART in Zurich – 26th Oct

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Spectacle’s Mark Saunders will be discussing East London and the commodification of local culture at reART in Zurich, Switzerland on Friday 26th Oct.

reART:theURBAN is an international conference that will revolve around the question of what art can do for the development of the urban society and the city itself. The conference takes place from the 25th-27th October this year, with talks from a number of international speakers, including Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek and Charles Landry, an urban thinker from the UK.

To find out more about the conference, go to the reART website and for more about Mark’s talk, click here

Click here to buy tickets

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The loss of a British Institution looms

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An important symbol of South London and a key feature of the city’s skyline, the Battersea Power Station, has been left to decay for more than twenty years. Created by Gilbert Scott in 1935, the building has slowly rotted away after both station’s A and B were  decommissioned in 1975 and 1983 respectively. The much-loved monument is listed on the English Heritage’s “Buildings at Risk” register.

For full article please click here.

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Pirate Urbanism: Delhi’s Commonwealth Regeneration

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Cuius testiculus habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum. If you have people’s attention, you have also their hearts and minds.

Not so for the building constructed as the headquarters for the Commonwealth Games 2010 in New Delhi. Stark, sublime and constructed out of grey brick with seemingly arbitrary flashes of colour in idiot-purple, it is no wonder it has stirred up furious controversy.

To put it into World Cup terms, the teams are as such. On one side you have the architects, praising it’s modern feel and visionary style; on the other, grassroots organisations and a not insignificant slice of the public decrying the cost and confused over the desired architectural intention……….

Battersea Power Station

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New to the Spectacle Archive

From gracing the covers of a Pink Floyd album to dominating the Skyline of London, Battersea Power Station is one of the capital’s greatest cultural icons. Yet since being decomissioned in 1983, the building has steadily deteriorated while waiting for development plans to come into fruition. Spectacle has been following the ongoing proposed plans for the iconic building.

Now available on Spectacle’s Archive page is footage from Control Room A and Control Room B within the Power Station.

Footage from the REO Exhibit including interviews with local residents (Alan and Terry)  is also available.

More on the Battersea Power Station Project.

For more interviews and extras visit the Spectacle Archive.

Chimney stacks of Money

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Battersea Power Station owners Treasury Holdings/REO have been arguing the chimneys are unsafe and need to be demolished and rebuilt, dismissing an alternative report by a team of three companies of concrete experts brought together by the World Monuments Fund & Twentieth Century Society that revealed there is no sign of structural distress in the chimneys and that the chimneys can be repaired for half the cost of demolition and rebuilding.

Given the abysmal history of the Power Station’s owners’ reluctance to do anything but the absolute minimum of repairs critics are doubtful they would ever replace the chimneys once demolished- leaving a featureless pile of bricks and little to protect. No doubt, like with the roof, promises will be made to replace the chimneys, but various unavoidable economic or unforeseen technical problems will be cited as external reasons not to replace them. By getting planning permission from Wandsworth Borough Council to take down the chimneys Parkview, the previous owners, greatly added to the resale value of the site when they flipped it. It is a well known property developers’ trick when faced with a listed building to destroy or degrade the key feature that makes a building worth saving e.g. the facade of the beautiful Firestone Building was bulldozed leaving nothing worth protecting.

Bulldozers outpace the Heritage bureaucrats

IN MEMORIAM THE ELEPHANT AND CASTLE DESTROYED BY PEEL HOLDINGS PLC

The “unsafe” nature of the chimneys is also used as an excuse to not open up the river front land for public use.  During the rare times the Power Station is open to the public the whole site is a hard hat area and the roofless interior space between the chimneys completely out of bounds for safety reasons. Interestingly when cash is on the table this same space can accommodate a giant marquee for public events.

Stage design mock-up

Marquee in between "unsafe" chimneys.

Rob Tincknell, managing director of Treasury Holdings, expressed our concerns exactly when he told Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Business Editor for the Evening Standard  04.06.09
Unveiled: the ‘last chance’ for Battersea Power Station

[Tincknell].. hopes the chimneys, thought to have been beyond repair, may be saved. The previous plan saw them being replaced by replicas. He said: “If this scheme does not make it, there is no power station. If you look back in history there has been disaster after disaster, rubbish scheme after rubbish scheme. We have designed, consulted and are about to put in a planning application. The project is in the hands of developers who know what they are doing.”

That’s what we are worried about.

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Visit Spectacle’s on-going Battersea Power Station Project

Watch a video trailer here: Battersea Power Station – The Story So Far

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If you would like to object to the planning applications for Battersea Power Station you have until January 31st 2010 click here for more details.

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Do you have any ideas for Battersea Power Station?

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Do you have ideas for how Battersea power station could be used NOW or in the FUTURE?

REO, the current owners of Battersea Power Station, make vague promises about community use and access to the site but all their plans are projected way into the future. REO’s schedule is “planning” until 2012 and building only set to finish in 2020- nearly 40 years after the power station was decommissioned.

Do you have any ideas for immediate use?

How about something for the kids like a giant adventure playground?
A river bus hub for river buses that acccept oyster cards?

The building is so huge, many times the size of its little and uglier sister the Tate Modern, it can probably accommodate all your ideas.

REO insist on only considering grandiose money making schemes on the site. They clearly plan to do nothing until 2012 and then only if they get their tube extension. This “all or nothing” approach flies in the face of current economic realities and other successful models of re-using industrial buildings based on either gradual and organic development or imaginative re-use of the spaces.

Do you have any ideas for how to use such a big building?

A museum of power technology; steam, water, wind, coal?
A Museum of the Thames? It could contain many boats, it has a river front. It has a great views from the chimneys.
An extension of the Science or Natural History Museums for all their bigger exhibits?
A Museum of Flight. Battersea has connections with aviation e.g.1900s Battersea Balloon Works.

Most of REO’s plans are for building around the site.Their ideas for the power station are banal, a conference centre (yawn), hotel and shopping (novel) and, would you believe, flats. If there was ever a building inappropriate for residential use it is Battersea Power Station. Their plans necessitate vandalising the magnificent brick facades by punching through windows in order to maximise income generating floor space. Light wells would be the more appropriate, architecturally sensitive but less profitable option.

Do you have any ideas that do not mean destroying the architectural value of the building?

REO make much of the “green spaces” ( the little bits between what they plan to build around the power station) but are less keen to make clear most are private spaces. Do you have ideas for the site that do not require surrounding and obscuring the Power Station with dense ugly office buildings?

Do you have any ideas how to use the current open spaces around the power station?

Doing nothing until 2020 demonstrates a bankruptcy of ideas by REO. If REO cannot think of, or at least allow, any uses that benefit Londoners and the local community then they are unsuitable custodians of a national treasure and should hand over the site to public ownership.

Visit Spectacle’s on-going Battersea Power Station Project

Watch a video trailer here: Battersea Power Station – The Story So Far

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If you live in the neighbourhood and would like to get involved, contact us here putting Battersea Power Station in your message.

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Battersea Power Station Original Plans

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Courtesy of Brian Barnes of the Battersea Power Station Community Group, what we have beneath are some of the original plans for the station, fuelling the debate on what the site should now be used for.

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Visit Spectacle’s on-going Battersea Power Station Project

Watch a video trailer here: Battersea Power Station – The Story So Far

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If you live in the neighbourhood and would like to get involved, contact us here putting Battersea Power Station in your message.

Click here for more Battersea Power Station links

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Architecture and Sport : Olympics 2012

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Architecture And – Sport : Olympics 2012 London
Public Presentation – 16 September 2008

Venue: Kunstmuseum, Basel (Switzerland)
Start Time: 6:15pm
Speakers: Marc Angélil and Mark Saunders
Entry: Free

Marc Angélil, Professor at the Department of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and film-maker Mark Saunders of Spectacle will discuss the 2012 London Olympic Developments.

Organised by: Architektur Dialoge Basel