Eight Power Stations That Found a Second Life as Arts and Culture Hubs

Battersea Power Station stood decommissioned for 39 years before WilkinsonEyre reopened it in 2022 as a shopping, office and residential complex. That project now headlines a roundup of eight converted power stations published by Dezeen, charting how architects keep recycling the same building type into very different lives.

The logic is structural. Power stations, Dezeen notes, typically offer expansive interiors with tall ceilings, giving architects unusual flexibility for conversion.

Which conversions made the list?

• Battersea Power Station, London, by WilkinsonEyre. The Grade II*-listed 1930s building now hosts a shopping centre in its restored turbine halls, with glazed apartments built atop the roof.
• Ballers, Philadelphia, by Good City Studio and Hexagon Studio Architects. The firms revamped the main turbine hall of the 1920s Delaware Power Station in Fishtown into a sports club with indoor pickleball, soccer and squash courts, part of the wider mixed-use complex The Battery.
• Dyson headquarters, Singapore, by M Moser Associates, W Architects and Studio Lapis. The 1926 St James Power Station's turbine hall became a four-storey atrium framed by exposed black steelwork and a sculptural spiral staircase.
• Tate Modern, London, by Herzog & de Meuron. The former Bankside Power Station, originally designed by Giles Gilbert Scott — who also designed Battersea — opened as a gallery in 2000 with a cathedral-like turbine hall space.
• Powerhouse Arts, Brooklyn, by Herzog & de Meuron. The studio converted the brick-clad turbine hall of a 115-year-old plant into an art manufacturing hub and rebuilt the demolished Boiler House in red concrete.
• Shajing Village Hall, Shenzhen, by ARCity Office. A 1980s plant was restored and extended as a community hub within a public wetland, its concrete remnants left as-found and supporting new steel and glass volumes.
• Global Leadership Centre, Oxford, by John McAslan + Partners. Oxford's first electrical power plant gained learning space and accommodation for Saïd Business School, with a triple-height entrance in the turbine hall and restored 1890s brick facades.
• Innovation Powerhouse, Eindhoven, by Atelier van Berlo, Eugelink Architectuur and De Bever Architecten. The former Philips power plant now houses a dozen businesses along a communal street-like passage, with the original structure and coal chutes preserved.

Why did the trend start with Tate Modern?

Herzog & de Meuron's 2000 transformation of Bankside, in Dezeen's framing, ignited a global trend of converting disused power stations into hubs of art and culture. Every project on the list that came after owes it something.

The Swiss studio remains the trend's most persistent practitioner, having followed Tate Modern with Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn two decades later. One turbine hall became a gallery; the other became a factory for making art. The genre, apparently, accommodates both.

What comes next for adaptive reuse?

The list's newest entries point in divergent directions: sports facilities in Philadelphia, university accommodation in Oxford, community space in Shenzhen. The power station has stopped being an arts-only proposition and become a general-purpose urban asset — one that arrives, conveniently, with cathedral ceilings already installed.