Battersea Power Station is an icon of the London cityscape: a Deco-era, red-brick hulk on the south bank of the Thames. Its twin chimneys can be spotted miles from the city center. The station might’ve once powered a fifth of London, but it needed storytelling power to succeed in its next chapter.
Shutting down in 1983, Battersea has since become a global beacon of creative reuse, welcoming a mix of retail and corporate tenants, plus apartment-dwellers, into its bulk since officially reopening in 2022. To introduce Londoners and tourists to the Power Station’s new era, we partnered with some of the world’s foremost architects and exhibition designers to create a welcome experience that would serve as the perfect prequel to the views awaiting guests atop the station’s northwest chimney.
Set in Turbine Hall A, the exhibition features dynamic animations, interactive tables, and immersive media and soundscapes. In a nod to the station’s electricity-generating roots, film, images, particles and colors animate across immersive digital screens.
Descriptive text emerges out of block color, mimicking the movement of Lift 109 out of the chimney top. Throughout the experience, graphics and icons carry the style of technical drawings, with energy flowing along circuit diagrams.
Impact
11M
Visitors in first year2023
Red Dot Design Award, Exhibition Design25K+
People living and working on-siteIn the planning stages we leaned heavily on a real-time VR model of Turbine Hall A to review media, test processing speeds, before buildout in the real-world space began.
This kind of cohesion doesn’t happen by coincidence. Across AR web apps, immersive spaces, interactive tables, LED screens and lighting sculptures, we worked with our partners to tell an aesthetically and tonally cohesive story that would leave visitors as awed by this marvelous structure as they’d soon be by the views 109 meters up.
I finally see London once again and she looks pretty darn good