ArchitectureArchitecture round-up
Eight converted power stations, from Tate Modern to Eindhoven's Innovation Powerhouse
Dezeen gathers decommissioned power stations given new lives as galleries, shops, offices, sports clubs and community halls across four continents.
Power stations make unusually good second-hand buildings. They were built big, with tall ceilings and wide-open interiors, which leaves architects plenty of room to rethink them. Dezeen's round-up starts where the idea took hold: Herzog & de Meuron's Tate Modern, opened in 2000 in Giles Gilbert Scott's Bankside Power Station. Its cathedral-like turbine hall set off a worldwide habit of turning old plants into cultural hubs.
Scott also designed Battersea Power Station, which sat empty for 39 years before WilkinsonEyre reopened it in 2022, with shops in the restored turbine halls and glazed flats on the roof. Herzog & de Meuron returned to the type in Brooklyn, where Powerhouse Arts makes art inside a surviving brick turbine hall beside a boiler house rebuilt in red concrete. In Philadelphia's Fishtown, the club Ballers puts pickleball, soccer and squash courts into a 1920s turbine hall.
Further afield, Dyson's Singapore headquarters has a four-storey atrium with a sculptural spiral stair. A 1980s Shenzhen plant has become Shajing Village Hall, with steel and glass volumes drawn from ancestral halls, while Oxford and Eindhoven add a business school centre and an innovation hub that keeps its coal chutes.
Several are public and easy to see; others are workplaces, so check access before you go.
Our summary of a story from Dezeen, published 17 October 2026. Read the original
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From Dezeen