The month...

Londoners, industrial architecture afficionados and Pink Floyd fans take note, the long abandoned shell of Battersea Power Station is finally being brought back to life thanks to a radical revamp by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly.

Plans for a mixed-use scheme were announced last month and include an immense 300m-high chimney and an ‘eco-dome’ - both part of a £4bn masterplan to provide around 750,000m2 of residential, office and retail space. Developer Real Estate Opportunities (REO) has billed it as the most advanced sustainable development ever built in the UK, with the grade II*-listed power station, built in 1939 by Giles Gilbert Scott, actually generating power again, but using renewable sources instead of coal.

‘The chimneys are brought back into operation, utilised to exhaust water vapour produced by a new biofuel energy plant located in the basement,’ Viñoly said of the project.

Others are not so enthusiastic. Former RIBA president George Ferguson called the new design a ‘major menace to London’, a ‘vast gimmicky tower’ which ‘reveals an evident lack of understanding of the vital place Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece holds in the London psyche and landscape.’ London’s Evening Standard was similarly critical – its architecture writer Rowan Moore branding the scheme ‘a towering affront to common sense’.

CM has devised a way to boost the scheme’s popularity, however: persuade rock band Pink Floyd, whose album Animals has an iconic image of the power station on the cover, to release a new album featuring Viñoly’s design.