New plans for the troubled Battersea power station site in London, unveiled yesterday (above), display long stratified blocks snakthg round the lumbering brick structure and giving definition to courtyards, parks and access routes,writes Edwin Heathcote, Architecture Critic.

 

These new blocks will contain 31700 homes and 1.5m sq ft of offices. Real Estate Opportunities, the developer, and Rafael Vinoly, the New York-based architect, have presented a more commercial proposal than the vast 300m glass eco-chimney that lay at the heart of their first attempts at redesigning the site a year ago. The new plans for the £4bn development retain the power station's shell, surrounding it with reflecting pools and filling it with a dense mix of office, leisure, retail and residential accommodation.

Even in its latest incarnation, this remains a vast scheme. The 38-acre riverside site in south-west  London represents an extraordinary opportunity that has gone unfulfilled since it stopped generating electricity in 1983. It seemed blighted by inaccessibility, toxic land and the inhibiting presence of the decaying but protected industrial monument at its centre. Yet with serious plans afoot for a £460m Northern line underground extension passing through the site, the relocation of the US embassy nearby and regeneration plans for the "Nine Elms Corridor", the area finally looks a solid, commercial proposition.

 

The architect has gone for broad curves and loose landscaping to counter the disparate character of the
surroundings, which have everything from clunky social housing to small-scale domesticity, enormous gas holders and the Victorian brick railway arches that cut through the district.

The blocks are expressed as a series of horizontal strata - their facades broken up by crinkly profiles. While the plans are less obviously visionary than the previous proposal, only the presence of Giles Gilbert Scott's monument to power makes these buildings look modest. Designed to reach only to the shoulders of the power station, at their highest they
still climb to 17 storeys. The architects have sought to alleviate their mass with a six-acre riverside park and wide open public space.