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Battersea Power Station £8bn redevelopment | Nine Elms | U/C

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#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
EDIT: Continued from previous thread.

- wjfox


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I wonder what Boris & Simon will think of this hmmmmmmm.

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3116482

Battersea Power Station - images

19 June, 2008

By Will Hurst

The first images of Rafael Viñoly's mixed-use design for Battersea Power Station have been revealed.

Owner and developer Real Estate Opportunities (REO) is aiming for the £4 billion scheme to become a zero carbon exemplar, BD's sister paper Property Week is due to report on Friday.

REO, part of Irish firm Treasury, aims to restore the derelict Grade II*-listed power station and convert it into a range of uses including apartments, retail, and a hotel while the remainder of the site will host a range of residential and office uses within a transparent structure topped by a 300m-high tower.

The tower itself appears to echo the chimneys of Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station itself.



 
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#256 ·
The first reply in this thread answers your question.
The people here are just talking about the technical aspects of the scheme. If the much reduced doon st tower is struggling to get through then this has about as much chance as Lord Lucan turning up and saying that he'd just been out for a walk.
 
#3 ·
I wonder what Boris & Simon will think of this hmmmmmmm.

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3116482

Battersea Power Station - images

19 June, 2008

By Will Hurst

The first images of Rafael Viñoly's mixed-use design for Battersea Power Station have been revealed.

Owner and developer Real Estate Opportunities (REO) is aiming for the £4 billion scheme to become a zero carbon exemplar, BD's sister paper Property Week is due to report on Friday.

REO, part of Irish firm Treasury, aims to restore the derelict Grade II*-listed power station and convert it into a range of uses including apartments, retail, and a hotel while the remainder of the site will host a range of residential and office uses within a transparent structure topped by a 300m-high tower.

The tower itself appears to echo the chimneys of Giles Gilbert Scott’s power station itself.



Frak me!!! I was not expecting a supertall here of all places.

I don't expect many people too, but... I like it. It looks like it could turn out a bit Tour Sans Fins, and the amount of greenery looks fantastic. I look forward to seeing more detailed plans. I can't see it going ahead, but it would be interesting if it did.
 
#5 ·
Indeed. It looks like they don't want to bother repairing the roof and are turning the innards into open space. Interesting idea but I think it's a bit of a cop out. Frankly, I just think it's important something gets built but I really can't see Wandsworth Council or Battersea's MP supporting this development, let alone Boris and Milton.
 
#8 ·
Full story in PW tomorrow so will look out for it.

Its obvious this was conceived in pre-Boris times & were relying on Ken with his new powers to approve planning appications to push this through. But now it wont be getting such an easy ride. There were plans to designate this whole stretch from BPS to Vauxhall as high density residential but not sure what will happen to these plans now tha Boris & Simon are the kings of the block.

H&S will also , im sure have words to say on this as they are getting rather uppety with regard developments near large gas holders.

Still, it be an interesting year or so on this as it gets put in for planning and is pillored from post to post from various sides.

I wonder what the restore battersea station brigade will make of this ;)
 
#11 ·
Based on looking simply at two images it appears to be an amazing concept and very different to past proposals, but is it serious? It will force Boris's hand though, to state whether he would be open to such a futuristic project or not. The high rise appears to be enormous, the third upper stage of the building shown on the ariel view isn't even included on the elevational image. This must be at least 1,000 ft high. It will be interesting to find out how many affordable housing units are included.
 
#13 ·
The thing is, I sport of like the idea of leaving the power station a shell and covering it with a super park, almost a sort of a modern day ruined castle that you can explore around, as long as it's safe just let nature take it's course.

The trouble is no developer is going to do this because obviously they wouldn't make any money, so this ridiculous developer proposes a massive glass greenhouse with a rubbish third rate tower on top.

I can't even blame Vinoly because I get the impression from this design even he thinks it's a rubbish masterplan.
 
#521 ·
You said it very well a year ago.

Unfortunately the tower wasn't even the worst piece, the massing is.

The developers should just be told straight in the face that they should take their loss. The problem is not the cost of restoring the power station, the problem is the speculation and greed which have driven up the price of the site to a level which does no longer allow the site to be developed without it becoming an eyesore. Whatever the new masterplan is, the constructed surface should not exceed the Hwong plans approved a few years ago.
 
#19 ·
the greenhouse idea is bonkers and the tower looks pretty ugly. looks like a 'concept' idea that practices put out to get some PR and not a serious proposal by a developer.

going from those renders it seems that the walls of the power station will house apartments with the central portion some sort of courtyard.
 
#22 ·
Battersea tower station

20.06.08

By James Whitmore

Real Estate Opportunities unveils £4bn Vinoly-designed plans for London icon

A breathtaking vision for a sustainable redevelopment of the historic Battersea Power Station site into 8m sq ft of mixed-use space is revealed by Property Week today.

Real Estate Opportunities (REO), the listed company managed by Irish developer Treasury Holdings, plans to spend £4bn creating the UK’s first zero-carbon scheme to a design by renowned Uruguayan architect Rafael Vinoly.

It proposes spending at least £100m to bring the derelict station – one of the world’s biggest brick buildings, which closed 25 years ago – back into a workable state before converting it into flats, a hotel, shops, cafes and restaurants. It also plans an energy museum to showcase the site’s renewable energy initiatives.

The remaining 32 acres of the Thamesside site would be developed mainly into flats to the north and offices to the south. The 2.5m sq ft of naturally ventilated offices would be covered by an ‘Eco-Dome’, with air coming in at ground level and exiting through a 300 metre-high, 32 metre-wide chimney, dubbed ‘the Spark Plug’.

REO, which bought the site in December 2006 for £400m, is determined the scheme should be deliverable, unlike the many proposals from previous site owners.

REO proposes to build a new Tube station at the site, which would be linked to the Northern Line. Its favoured route would cost an estimated £347m, paid for by REO and other large landowners in the 100 acre Nine Elms Opportunity Area.
 
#23 ·
The 2.5m sq ft of naturally ventilated offices would be covered by an ‘Eco-Dome’, with air coming in at ground level and exiting through a 300 metre-high, 32 metre-wide chimney, dubbed ‘the Spark Plug’.
Would this work like a solar updraft tower using the convection currents created by the large glass roof to drive turbines in the tower? Its gonna be very windy around the base and quite hot in the building if thats the case.
 
#24 ·
Power dressing

20.06.08

By James Whitmore

Will the latest plan for Battersea Power Station, REO’s £4bn, Vinoly-designed ‘Eco-Dome’ become a reality?

Another year, another proposal for the redevelopment of the derelict Shell that is Battersea Power Station and the 32 acres surrounding it.

Yet, 25 years after one of the world’s biggest brick buildings closed, the latest plan by new owner Real Estate Opportunities, revealed today in Property Week, is the most ambitious, the most breathtaking and the most likely proposal so far to see the light of day. For the first time, the owner acknowledges that the relatively inaccessible site needs a Tube station to make it viable.

The highlight of the scheme is an area of five office blocks covered, like Cornwall’s Eden Project, in a plastic dome with a 300 metre-high glass ‘chimney’ that is open to the elements – and which has already been dubbed ‘the Spark Plug’.

Setting out its goals as ‘deliverability’ and ‘sustainability’, which is a lot more that can be said for the many ill-fated proposals from previous site owners, first John Broome and then Victor Hwang, REO aims to develop 8m sq ft of flats, offices, shops, hotels and leisure facilities. The estimated cost is a dizzying £4bn.

A community consultation, for which a suite has been created on the site, will begin on Monday 7 July and a planning application is due to be lodged at the end of this year or beginning of next.

Unknown quantity

REO is not a household name in the UK. It is 67% owned by Irish developer and investor Treasury Holdings, which employs more than 500 people, is the largest western investor in China – through AIM-listed company China Real Estate Opportunities – and prides itself on its Green development credentials.

Treasury has a dedicated environmental division, which employs around 30 people, and is developing the 50m sq ft Dongtan, the world’s first ‘eco-city’, near Shanghai.

The Battersea masterplan has been designed by Uruguyan architect Rafael Vinoly. He envisages 3m sq ft of flats in the power station, around the glass chimney and in separate blocks to the north of the site near the River Thames, 2.5m sq ft of offices, 1m sq ft of hotels and serviced flats, 900,000 sq ft of Covent Garden-style retailing in the power station and 500,000 sq ft of leisure and cultural space.

To offset the square bulk of the power station, the buildings around it are fluid, curvy and stepped. The power station appears to rise above manmade lakes in a ‘halo’ that Vinoly has designed to surround it. The public spaces, including a riverside walk, and residential blocks will be to the north by the Thames and the domed offices to the south.

Watching Vinoly discussing his plans on the marketing video, while standing on one of the few dry bits of land within the derelict power station, is to realise the enormity of REO’s task.

Rob Tincknell, the managing director of Treasury Holdings UK, which is the external manager of listed company REO, says Battersea ‘is the biggest regeneration opportunity in London left today’ but acknowledges that there are enormous site constraints. These include railway lines, gas holders, the Thames Water Ring Main – which runs under the site – views that have to be protected and public access.

But by far the biggest constraint is the crumbling power station, which stands right in the middle of the site and requires at least £100m spent on it simply to return it to a workable state. Once that has happened, Vinoly’s design envisages flats on the top level, a designer hotel below and shops, cafes and restaurants at ground level in the two turbine halls. An energy museum would also be created to showcase the renewable energy aims of REO.

Sustainability is the key theme for REO. ‘It will be the UK’s first zero-carbon scheme,’ says Tincknell. This is a neat twist – after it opened in 1957 the power station pumped out 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 14 tonnes of sulphur dioxide every hour, giving it, without doubt, the largest carbon footprint in London.

This will be achieved by REO producing its own renewable energy for the site in the power station and creating office buildings that will be the first in any UK city to be naturally ventilated.

The buildings will be under an ‘Eco-Dome’ covered in ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, known by its abbreviation, ETFE. It is the polymer that has been used at the Eden Project in Cornwall, Terminal 5 at Heathrow and the Allianz Arena in Munich, home to Bayern Munich football club. Air will enter the dome and the offices via vents at ground level and exit through the 300 metre-high, 32 metre-wide chimney. The roofs of the office blocks, which will be in a hot pocket of air at the top of the dome, will be turned into tropical gardens.

Tincknell says the offices will produce only a third of the energy of a typical UK office building – 113KWhr/sq m/year – and will be attractive to the increasing number of occupiers with a corporate social responsibility agenda.

Route and branch

While it may tick all the sustainability boxes, the scheme is not viable unless a new Tube station is built, as 4,000 residents and up to 25,000 employees – not to mention daily visitors – could not be catered for by the existing network of buses and mainline trains.

As Tincknell admits: ‘If we don’t have significant improvement in public transport, then we will have to rethink our plans.’

REO has come up with three route options for an extension of the Northern Line in a spur from Kennington. Its favoured route would cost an estimated £347m and would have two stops, Wandsworth Town and Battersea. It would be entirely paid for by REO and other local landowners, working within the Nine Elms Opportunity Area .

Tincknell believes that this large contribution by REO in addition to the heritage and cultural attractions it will provide should count in reducing the amount of affordable housing it should provide. If not, the scheme becomes financially unviable and another Battersea Power Station proposal will bite the dust.
 
#31 ·
Battersea's £4bn glass tower to dwarf the Wharf
Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Affairs Editor
20.06.08
Evening Standard

A £4 billion masterplan to save Battersea Power Station before it collapses was unveiled today.

The project includes a 1,000ft-high glass tower - taller than Canary Wharf - next to the instantly recognisable brick landmark. There will be more than 3,000 homes, shopping malls, a boutique hotel and a "green" office quarter.

The plans also call for a new spur off the Northern Line to link the power station site to the Underground network.

The Irish developers, the third owners of the power station since it was decommissioned in 1983, describe the scheme as "the most exciting real estate proposal ever to come forward in Britain."

Its most radical element is the transparent canopy over the office development officially known as the Ecodome, but already dubbed "The Funnel".

The Funnel, the brainchild of Uruguayan architect Rafael Vinoly, will be topped with a huge glass chimney and will provide its own "natural" air conditioning to the development, hugely reducing its electricity needs.

Developer Treasury Holdings UK says it is essential to make the whole project carbon neutral. If it gets the go ahead, the Funnel will be higher than any structure now standing in London when it is completed in 2019.

It will tower above the 771ft One Canada Square at Canary Wharf. The developers insist that the transparent dome, to be made of a similar material to that covering the Eden Project in Cornwall, is not a building but a "solar driven natural ventilation system," the biggest of its kind in the world. It will cover a 2.5 million square foot office development which will have only a third of the energy needs of conventional offices.

The sun will heat the air under the Dome, causing it to rise up the tower, known as the chimney. That will in turn suck in air from outside the glass canopy, which will will stop at thirdstorey level, creating a constant breeze that will cool the offices.

The chimney will surround apartments up to 240 metres but the top 60 metres will be an empty glass tube. The absence of electricity-hungry air conditioning will help the developers achieve their target of carbon neutrality, making the project hugely attractive to "progressive" tenants such as Google and Apple that the developers hope to attract. Rob Tincknell, managing director of Treasury Holdings UK, said: "This is not a token gesture, it will make a serious dent in the level of emissions.

"The annual carbon reduction is 80,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, the same as a town the size of Newbury."

On either side of the power station will be three large apartment blocks, built "no higher" than the base of the chimneys. In total there will be 3,200 homes on the site, a huge advance on the 750 proposed by previous owners Parkview. Today's proposal is the latest in a long succession of plans to find a use for the 83-year-old p ower stat i on. All have foundered because of spiralling costs and the fast deteriorating state of the building.

The latest project is likely to be the last chance to save the world famous "cathedral of industry" with its four white chimneys towering over the Thames. It has stood abandoned for 25 years and is in desperate need of repair work. The chimneys, which are suffering from concrete rot, will have to be pulled down and replaced by replicas.

The restored power station will be at the centre of a 38-acre site with eight million square feet of shops, apartment, cafes, offices and a hotel.

The developers want to create three floors of shopping with many independent stores "to give it the feel of a Covent Garden or a Neal's Yard." and a two-storey hotel.

Mr Tincknell said: "This will be Britain's first truly verifiable carbon neutral major development.

"If people begin to see the credibility of the scheme and see the benefits of it, I think people will support it."

The power station was bought by Irish property tycoons Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett, who control Treasury Holdings, for £400 million last year.
 
#32 ·
A towering affront to common sense
Rowan Moore
20.06.08
Evening Standard

The developer and architects of the proposed redevelopment of Battersea Power Station and its surroundings are not short of cojones.

Treasury Holdings and Rafael Vinoly's plans for the most blighted large site in central London are based on the assessment that what it really needs is a 1,000ft glass tube, the largest tower in Europe, containing for the most part nothing but air.

It seems to be spectacularly, riotously, extravagantly nuts.

This tower will sit slap behind the Palace of Westminster in protected views from Hungerford and Waterloo Bridges, calling into question once again the Palace's status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It will stand in a neighbourhood not noted for skyscrapers. It will dwarf the listed power station next to which it will stand. And it is being proposed weeks after the triumph of the tower-sceptic Mayor Boris Johnson and his planning advisor Sir Simon Milton, for whom this is surely the perfect opportunity to prove their mettle by shooting it down.

At its bottom the tower spreads out into a kind of gigantic glass skirt containing 2.5 million square feet of offices, the equivalent of five gherkins, in a single structure that would have to be built all at once.

This in an area that is far from being an office hotspot and which, even with a proposed new Northern line spur linking it to Kennington station, will not be well connected. The current economy is also not propitious for such a scheme, though here Treasury Holdings can reasonably claim that, by the time of its projected completion in 2018, things might be looking up.

Usually office developments are built in stages, moving cautiously forward only once the first parts have found tenants. This would be, by a wide margin, Britain's largest single office construction to be built in one go. It is proposed, moreover, in a death zone that has defied successive property booms and has now stood empty for longer than it was fully operational as a power station. Vinoly starts his description of the project by citing the obstacles to development — the cost of building transport links and restoring the old power station — but he then creates what looks like another with his giant glass tube.

It is, to be sure, different from the other towers recently proposed. Most of these are giant crates of office space or flats, packed to capacity, leaden of demeanour, styled with swoops and curves in an attempt to look “iconic”. The rationale of Vinoly's tower is environmental: the aim is to make a “zero-carbon” development, including naturally ventilated offices.

One way to achieve naturally ventilated offices is to create chimneys which, as hot air rises, naturally pulls drafts through buildings. The Battersea chimney would cool a very large number of offices, and is therefore the largest such chimney ever built.

The creation of a big empty tube, wrapped only with a certain number of luxury flats, is in defiance of all known rules of property development — don't build empty space; maximise the amount of “net” or useable floor area — which makes Vinoly's proposal more charming than other tower proposals.

Its daring also makes it more attractive than other towers. Might this be the sort of truly visionary work that Britain repeatedly fails to achieve? If the Mayor turns it down will this be another triumph for our reputed small-mindedness? Why not, just once, create something as extreme as this?

Here's why. I don't doubt Treasury Holdings' desire to create a zero-carbon development but this can surely be achieved in other ways than a 1,000ft tube. The suspicion must be that it is a tower because that's what architect and developer wanted, a suspicion backed by rumours over the last year that towers were part of the plan from the beginning.

The tower, therefore, becomes a monument to architectural and developmental ego. A marketing tool for an office development becomes the biggest thing on the skyline, making its mark on the Houses of Parliament. Battersea Power Station is already a substantial icon in its own right: so what need is there of this giant rival?
Then there is the likelihood that, even if it wins planning permission, it will never be built. Towers are riskier and harder to get off the ground than other forms of development, being slower and more costly to build. For the past few years we have repeatedly been told of the need to build towers yet many that have been permitted are not going up. The Ozymandian scale of the Battersea tower increases the chances that at least part of this place will remain empty for another generation.

It is intriguing that Treasury Holdings is betting on such an apparently bonkers idea, as neither the company nor Vinoly is stupid. Maybe there is some industrial poison lurking in the Battersea soil, which causes its owners to lose any sense of proportion and propose ideas like the theme park and the shopping-mall-cum-acrobatic-performance-space, previously put forward for the place, that have since bitten the dust.

It may be that they are true visionaries. It may also be that they are trying it on. It may be that they are proposing something so big in the expectation that any future proposals for the site will look reasonable by comparison. They may be trying to distract attention from the not-tiny 20-storey residential blocks that are also part of their scheme, and from the fact that they want to put twice as much accommodation — eight million square feet — on the site as a whole, than was previously proposed.

We can also be sure that the plan was conceived with a different Mayor in mind, one who would have been armed with enhanced powers to push a scheme like this through. Ken Livingstone, with his love of towers almost anywhere, would have looked more kindly on the plan than Boris Johnson, who believes towers should be concentrated in places where they are already common, such as the City and Canary Wharf.

So the message to Treasury Holdings, and to the Wandsworth planners and the Mayor, who must judge their scheme, is this. Forget it. Do not try to compromise with a tower two-thirds as high. Do not build a tower. Aim for zero-carbon and beautiful buildings but concentrate on making a decent neighbourhood. And on something that will actually get built.

The Battersea tower seems destined for those books on unbuilt London that include a straightened Thames, a tower on top of Selfridges, and plans for inhabited bridges. In saying this I may be putting myself in the category of those who laughed when Christopher Columbus told them that the world was round. But I don't think so.
 
#66 ·
A towering affront to common sense
Rowan Moore
20.06.08
Evening Standard

The developer and architects of the proposed redevelopment of Battersea Power Station and its surroundings are not short of cojones.

Treasury Holdings and Rafael Vinoly's plans for the most blighted large site in central London are based on the assessment that what it really needs is a 1,000ft glass tube, the largest tower in Europe, containing for the most part nothing but air.

Why the **** can we not build something like this? Why not? Why shouldn't we able to express ourselves and the wonderful engineering feats we are capable of. Asian countries are doing it. Dubai is doing it. Even if we question the taste of some of these projects, we cannot deny the genius of the engineering. Why the hell shouldn't there be a glass tube 1000 ft in the air? This project needn't just be 'hot air'. Where is the bloody imagination nowadays. I get so tired and bored of our world sometimes.

It seems to be spectacularly, riotously, extravagantly nuts.

And this is something that can be celebrated.

This tower will sit slap behind the Palace of Westminster in protected views from Hungerford and Waterloo Bridges, calling into question once again the Palace's status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

This is the statement that perhaps sums up everything that is wrong with our planning system, our planning ethics, and our imaginations or lack of.

It will stand in a neighbourhood not noted for skyscrapers. It will dwarf the listed power station next to which it will stand. And it is being proposed weeks after the triumph of the tower-sceptic Mayor Boris Johnson and his planning advisor Sir Simon Milton, for whom this is surely the perfect opportunity to prove their mettle by shooting it down.

Of course they will shoot it down, they are small minded buffoons. The power station is saved in this scheme, when they never gave a crap about it before.

At its bottom the tower spreads out into a kind of gigantic glass skirt containing 2.5 million square feet of offices, the equivalent of five gherkins, in a single structure that would have to be built all at once.

Like Wren built his great cathedral you mean, all those years ago. How long did it take him again?

This in an area that is far from being an office hotspot and which, even with a proposed new Northern line spur linking it to Kennington station, will not be well connected. The current economy is also not propitious for such a scheme, though here Treasury Holdings can reasonably claim that, by the time of its projected completion in 2018, things might be looking up.

True really.
This will not get built.
 
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