A towering affront to common sense

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.