Gehry at Battersea: this is not an expansion, it is the last two of five

ARCHITECTURE · COMMERCIAL

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Frank Gehry always drew five buildings for Battersea. Three of them opened in 2022. The two consented last May complete a composition that was designed more than a decade ago, which makes this a finishing rather than an addition. What has changed in the interval is not the architecture. It is what one of the buildings is now for.

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Wandsworth Council granted detailed planning consent in May 2025 for Phase 3C at Battersea Power Station: two residential buildings by Gehry Partners, holding 306 homes between them. Construction was expected to begin later in 2025, with completion anticipated in 2029.

The two buildings are Prospect Place 3 and Prospect Place 4. They sit on a shared podium with a private communal garden square, and they complete Electric Boulevard by adding around 65,000 square feet of retail, café and restaurant space, a 15,000 square foot Community Hub developed with Wandsworth Council, and an expanded bike hub with 600 free spaces.

The word attached to this scheme in most coverage is expansion. It is worth being precise, because the accurate word tells you more.

Gehry Partners’ contribution to Phase 3 was always five buildings: Prospect Place 1 to 4 and The Flower, the centrepiece at the heart of the development. Three of those opened when Electric Boulevard did, in October 2022. Prospect Place 3 and 4 are the remaining two.

So this is not a practice being invited back to add something. It is the completion of a five-building composition drawn more than ten years ago, and the interesting question is what has changed in the gap.

The answer is not the architecture. It is the brief.

Prospect Place 3 is for people over sixty-five

Prospect Place 3 will provide senior living apartments for the over-65s, with specialist management and on-site care. It is the first accommodation of that kind anywhere on the Battersea site.

Stop on that for a moment, because it is much more unusual than a line in a planning summary suggests.

Retirement and later living housing in Britain has an established typology, and almost every part of it points away from what is happening here. It tends to be suburban rather than central. It tends to be low-rise, two or three storeys around a garden. It tends to be a discrete campus set slightly apart, with its own entrance, its own parking and its own visual identity, so that it reads as a category of building rather than as ordinary housing.

Prospect Place 3 is none of those things. It is a mid-rise block on a new pedestrianised high street, sharing a podium and a garden square with a building of general market flats, sitting above 65,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, next door to a community hub and a bike store, four minutes from a Northern line station, in a sculptural white facade indistinguishable in language from its neighbours.

The building does not announce what it is. That is the argument, and it is made in plan and section rather than in a brochure.

There is a genuine design problem underneath it, and it is the thing worth watching when the building opens. Later living accommodation has requirements that are unusually specific: level access throughout, generous circulation widths, turning space, a legible route from the street to the front door, back of house for care staff, and enough clarity in the plan that a resident with reducing mobility or eyesight can navigate it without effort.

Gehry’s architecture is built on variation. Every apartment in the completed Prospect Place buildings is individually configured, and the facades model and fold rather than repeat.

The interesting question is therefore how the variation and the legibility are reconciled, and the likely answer, on the evidence of the completed blocks, is that they operate at different scales. The modelling happens in the envelope and the massing. The plan discipline sits underneath it, in the cores, the corridors and the level changes. If that holds, this becomes a genuinely useful precedent: proof that specialist housing does not have to look like specialist housing, and that older residents can be given the best address on the site rather than a quiet corner of it.

That is a more ambitious proposition than another tower of flats, and it is the reason this phase is worth writing about at all.

Electric Boulevard is a street built by two opposed practices

The wider move it completes is a masterplanning device, and a clever one.

Electric Boulevard is a new pedestrianised high street running from the Northern line extension station to the Power Station itself. Gehry Partners designed one side of it. Foster + Partners designed the other, in the form of the Battersea Roof Gardens.

Consider what that instruction actually is. Two of the most recognisable practices in the world, with close to opposite instincts, given facing sides of the same street. Foster works in the rectilinear, the repeated and the precisely detailed. Gehry works in the modelled, the folded and the individually varied. Put them across a street from each other and neither side can be mistaken for the other.

The reason to do that is the hardest thing to achieve in a new district, which is age.

A high street that has grown over two centuries is a collage. Different owners, different builders, different dates, different heights, no coordination. That accumulated difference is most of what makes an old street pleasant to walk down. A high street delivered by one developer to one design code in one contract has none of it, and reads as a development however good the individual buildings are.

Commissioning the two sides from architects who could not converge if they tried is a way of manufacturing that difference on day one. Gehry has said the masterplan “was designed to create the feeling of a neighbourhood”, and this is the mechanism by which that feeling is engineered rather than hoped for.

Phase 3C adds a further layer of the same thing. These two buildings are being designed and detailed seven years after their siblings, by the same practice, to a partly different brief, and will complete in 2029 against a 2022 neighbour. Even with one architect, that gap will show in the specification, the glazing, the servicing and the sustainability standards. Another layer of difference, acquired honestly.

The Nash claim is more defensible than it sounds

The buildings are described as having white sculptural facades referencing the Regency terraces of John Nash.

That is the sort of line that usually sits in a planning statement without doing any work, and in this case it holds up better than most.

Nash’s terraces around Regent’s Park are white stuccoed, long, and unified across many houses behind a single continuous elevation. What is easy to forget is how heavily modelled they are: bows, recessions, pediments, projecting bays and end pavilions, all in one material, all reading as light and shadow rather than as colour or pattern.

That is a reasonable description of what Gehry is doing here. A long white frontage, uniform in material, whose interest comes entirely from how it folds and catches light, running in front of accommodation that varies unit by unit behind it.

There is a second and better parallel. A Nash terrace puts a single grand facade in front of a set of individual houses, so the street reads as one composition while the dwellings behind stay separate. Gehry’s blocks do something structurally similar: an envelope treated as one sculptural event, with individually configured apartments behind it.

The materials and the geometry are two centuries apart. The proposition, which is that a white modelled frontage can unify varied dwellings into a single urban gesture, is the same one. Citing Nash on a Battersea high street turns out to be a claim about London terrace-making rather than a decorative flourish, and the buildings support it.

What the geometry costs, and the number that proves it

Here is the detail that will not appear anywhere else, and it is the most revealing thing in the whole project.

Buro Happold engineered Phase 3. To handle the geometry of Gehry’s blocks, they developed an interoperability routine specifically to simplify the form of the slab edge, and it reduced analysis time from two days to two hours per iteration.

Read that number again. Before the routine existed, every time the design of a floor edge moved, checking it took two days. On a scheme of five buildings, more than 900 homes across Phase 3 as a whole, in six blocks of seventeen and eighteen storeys, that is an unworkable rate of iteration.

This is what sculptural architecture actually costs, and it is almost never quantified. Not in cladding, which everyone discusses, but in the number of times a team can afford to test a decision. A rectilinear building can be checked quickly, so it can be refined many times. A folded building cannot, unless somebody builds the tools to make it possible.

Buro Happold built the tools. Two days became two hours, which is roughly a twentyfold increase in how often the design could be interrogated, and that is the difference between a shape that is drawn and a shape that is resolved.

Adamson Associates acted as executive architect across the phase, which is the other half of the same story: the practice that converts a Gehry geometry into a set of buildable, coordinated, warrantable construction information.

None of those three names appear in the coverage of this consent, and the buildings do not exist without them.

Where the phase sits in the whole

Worth setting the scale, because Battersea is now large enough that individual phases lose their bearings.

The masterplan is by Rafael Viñoly Architects. The restoration of the Grade II* listed Power Station itself is by WilkinsonEyre. Circus West Village, the first phase, was designed by SimpsonHaugh and dRMM and completed in 2017. Phase 3 is Gehry and Foster.

Across the 42-acre site, more than 2,200 homes have been delivered, including 386 affordable homes at New Mansion Square with Peabody. There are over 150 retail, dining and leisure venues, more than 3,500 office workers across 60 companies, and Apple’s 500,000 square foot UK headquarters inside the Power Station. The site supports over 6,800 jobs, and Phase 3C is expected to add more than 400 during construction and in operation.

Phase 3C also carries green roofs throughout and targets a minimum 10 per cent biodiversity net gain, which is now a statutory requirement in England and is worth noting as a marker of when the phase was designed rather than as a distinguishing feature.

The relevant point for a design reader is that Battersea has reached the stage where the interesting decisions are no longer about the big objects. The Power Station is restored, the station is open, the offices are let. What is left is the connective work: a high street, a community hub, a garden square, and housing for people who are not the young professionals a development of this kind usually addresses first.

That is the least glamorous part of any masterplan and the part that decides whether it becomes a neighbourhood.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this story is a name. Frank Gehry, Battersea, two more buildings, approved.

The version worth keeping has two parts.

The first is that this is a finishing rather than an addition. Five buildings were drawn, three were built, and these are the last two, which means Battersea is about to see a composition resolved rather than extended.

The second is what happened to the brief in the interval. One of those two buildings is now housing for people over sixty-five, with care on site, placed on the best street in the development, above the shops, in exactly the same architecture as everything around it.

Masterplans are usually judged on their landmarks. This one will be judged on whether the high street works, whether the community hub is used, and whether older residents living above a row of restaurants in a Gehry facade turns out to be a good idea.

On the evidence of the drawings, it should be. Worth going back in 2029 to find out.