The very words "Battersea Power Station" are enough to elicit a collective groan these days, so anaesthetised have we become to bold new plans to turn the London landmark into a theme park/ice rink/hotel/shopping mall/football stadium/urban park. It's defeated architects and property developers so many times, fatigue has just about set in permanently. If they announced it was going to become an intergalactic rocket launchpad tomorrow, we'd all yawn.
But here we go again. Just two months ago Terry Farrell, now Boris Johnson's design advisor, proposed turning the site into an urban park (which would entail knocking part of it down), while speculators observed it would be worth nearly half a billion pounds more without the power station. But now architects Allies and Morrison have come along with another scheme to save it.
The new scheme – jointly devised with Save Britain's Heritage and launched this week – is called Inhabiting the Shell, and like Farrell's proposal, it wisely suggests transforming the building step by step. Unlike Farrell's, though, it aims to do so without demolishing any of it. Nor, like previous schemes such as Rafael Viñoly's, would it crowd out Giles Gilbert Scott's monumental 1930s edifice with tall buildings. In the first phase, temporary seats would be installed in the boiler house (the main space between the four chimneys), and it would be an 11,000-seat open air venue (Pink Floyd reunion gig, anyone?). Later, a roof would be put on and more permanent facilities installed, and finally, hospitality boxes for sponsors put in, some time around 2030. Meanwhile, the two turbine halls either side of the boiler house would be used for events, receptions, exhibitions and launches – like the Brit awards, they suggest. And around it would be blocks of low-rise residential buildings and a public square by the river.
Details are sketchy, and prospects pessimistic until proven otherwise, but there's something appealing about using the building in its raw state, as it is now. As a semi-ruined found space, it's far more atmospheric than it would be as a sanitised shopping mall. The future of the building is currently in the balance, hence Allies & Morrison and Save just putting this out there, though Graham Morrison and Save previously teamed up to study what to do with Battersea just before it was decommissioned, in 1981 – at which time they suggested turning it into a sports venue. Who knows what will happen next, but there's an argument for making it a working part of the city again, like its younger sister Tate Modern. If we don't do something soon, it will have been derelict for longer than it served as an actual power station.
Over to Belfast and on the heels of the Titanic visitor centre, the week before last, another, more conventional sort of cultural institution opened yesterday. This is the Metropolitan Arts Centre, or MAC, a venue for music, theatre, dance and art. It should put the city on the map for the non-maritime-disaster tourist, and it will doubtless put its local designers, Hall McKnight, on the map too – although they did already win the Young Architects of the Year award in 2008. It's an intelligent scheme that integrates into the tight-knit cityscape yet stands out, with its robust industrial-looking facades of brick and concrete. Inside, it opens up into a series of generous skylit terraces and courtyards – destined to become a gathering place in a city where the weather can be unforgiving. The venue's first exhibition compares LS Lowry and local artist William Conor, while its first stage play is about, um, the Titanic.
Now on to a few collisions of architecture and cinema, prompted by the conversion of Covent Garden's underground Flower Cellars into a gallery for the London Film Museum. The new space, by KPF architects, preserves what remained of the building's original brick vaults, but adds in crisp white public areas, and a striking monochrome exhibition space that sets off the opening exhibition of Magnum movie-set photography.
There are rich pickings at the movies for architecture spotters right now. First, the only worthwhile segment of new product-placement sci-fi atrocity Battleship is the lovingly rendered destruction of Hong Kong's famous skyline, and in particular, IM Pei's iconic Bank of China tower, which is symbolically castrated by some flying alien weaponry. They always said it had bad feng shui . Anyone who sat through the very similar Transformers 3 last year will have witnessed an even more detailed rendition of skyscraper destruction – do they have a resentful architect on their special effects team?
There's a skyscraper that needs destroying in the long-awaited Avengers Assemble, Marvel's climactic superhero movie. The movie's actually pretty fun for what it is, but a large part of the action takes place around the new nuclear-powered Manhattan headquarters/shag pad of Tony Stark AKA Iron Man aka Robert Downey Jr. Stark Tower is a hideous, lopsided monstrosity of a building, a mix of oligarch garishness and corporate blandness, with a cantilevered helipad and an ostentatious penthouse bachelor pad. Whoever Stark hired to design it should be exiled to Dubai or Macau or somewhere. Fortunately it does get pretty trashed, but at the end they start to rebuild it – no!
No such bombast in forthcoming French drama Goodbye First Love, though it does centre on a heartbroken young architecture student. When her boyfriend leaves her to go backpacking, she falls for her handsome architecture professor (who finds her work unusually mature, of course). The couple bond over field trips to the Bauhaus and Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and discussions of guttering and downpipes – that's more like it!
Which leads us off the subject but on to what is surely the last word in celebrity design: shoes by John Malkovich. No, really. It's not a Spike Jonze marketing stunt, but a new fashion and design initiative by tyre/softcore calendar brand Pirelli. Malkovich actually launched his own clothing range last year, with the by no means pretentious title of Technobohemian. Even better, for Pirelli he's done a canvas and denim ankle boot with "piqué-print rubber appliqué" – called the "Boholacchino". Something tells us his advertising slogan won't be "Fancy being John Malkovich? Try walking in his shoes."
