Every Render Tells A Story

Picture for a second you're a NIMBY organization and there's a new local development you oppose. How are you going to go about it?

Well if you're the Battersea Power Station Community Group you'll take a nice photo of the British Houses of Parliament and superimpose behind it, completely inaccurately, the building you oppose.

The scale of the scheme will be wrong, as will be the location of it, but that won't matter because your point will be made. People will see how the Houses of Parliament will be ruined by this building that won't actually go where you've put it and then they are bound to support your campaign for sure!

For those who don't know any better, they'll pick up the newspaper and be outraged. The damage is done to the project you are opposing even if there isn't an ounce of truth to your allegations and it's not like anyone will notice. Right?

The project in question is of course Raffael Vinoly's super-tall solar chimney with a ring of flats that could crown the renovated Battesea Power Station if it gets the go-ahead.

The justification for this from the group is that "our contention is that the impact of the tower on the Palace of Westminster and the Westminster World Heritage Site would be catastrophic".

If their contention is indeed correct why does the Battersea Power Station Community Group feel the need to be so economical with the truth? If the argument is so strong, why don't they commission a proper survey that shows the harm done instead of just inventing things?

This isn't the first time this has happened. English Heritage notably published a mock up of what the City of London could look like if all the tall buildings got the go ahead. In it they included both the Gherkin and Millennium Tower on the same plot for maximum effect. They even republished the image in 2007 with a new version that retained both towers.

Presumably Foster is not just a brilliant architect but also an expert manipulator of quantum physics who has worked out how to locate two skyscrapers on the very same plot of land thus doubling the amount of commissions he could take on.

It just goes to show there are still plenty of people out there who are willing to manipulate the truth to fit their own narrow agendas rather than trust some accurate surveying that can tell scientifically just what will go where.