Batterseas Spark Plug In Action

The reception has been largely positive, perhaps in no small part thanks to the sheer novelty of it, but just how does the Spark Plug, the 300 metre tall structure planned to sit at the heart of a revamped Battersea Power Station work?

Rafael Vinoly's concept behind the structure is actually one that is surprisingly simple and has been successfully used for many years and was originally pioneered by the Arabs where it is still featured in the surviving traditional homes that the rich lived in.

Called Al-Barjeel or wind tower, this was a tall structure that roof several storeys above the roof level of the building and was open to the winds at the top. The inside of the tower would be hollow and it would also be open at the bottom designed to suck the prevailing wind in whilst sheltering the interior from the sun thus cooling the entire building.

In a more temperate climate such as Britain the principal is simply reversed. Its glass dome is shaped to capture the energy of the sun that creates a current inhaling the cool air from around the base.

The office buildings within the glass dome will work on the same principle with their atriums designed to naturally circulate the cool air from outside and expel it from the roof of the building.

Between the slabs of each floor will be naturally heated, or cooled water depending on the weather that can regulate the temperatures within the building eliminating the need for power hungry air conditioning.

With the hot air rising, it gets expelled out of the top of the Spark Plug just as a chimney works powering a wind turbine in the centre as it gets flushed out. The entire process is completely natural but despite being so obvious, there have been no buildings in the United Kingdom, let alone an entire complex that have ever been built like this.

The closest that we have come to this in the past was the original plans for atriums on 30 St Mary Axe, aka the Gherkin, to spiral all the way up the building from the base to top allowing air to circulate. These were dropped after worries that a fire could spread unguarded through the building and instead the atria were limited to a height of six floors each.

Whether the sheer scale of the proposals count against it and planning permission is refused remains to be seen. However, being such a blindingly obvious concept for a glass building to employ means that even if the Spark Plug doesn't make it through planning you can expect that other versions of it will appear in architecture in the not too distant future.