5. Jazz Modernism and Battersea Power Station

Scott’s secular buildings also attempt to address the concept of monumentality, and certainly the idea of iconicity and scale, often by employing many of the same techniques used in his two famous power stations, Bankside and Battersea. Battersea Power Station, whose design Scott edited in order to ‘defuse public controversy,’ represents the architect’s attempt to use new materials in order to reflect the sentiment held by older forms, while melding those forms with 20^th century design. The original design, developed by James Theo Halliday, consisted of two immense, symmetrical boiler houses, with four chimneys rising from the corners. [1] While Scott couldn’t change the four-chimney design of Battersea, he redesigned the four-corner chimneys to resemble “classical columns in concrete,” and faced the walls with “beautiful brickwork which enlivened with vertical jazz-modern fluting along the parapets…what John Betjeman one disparaged as ‘restrained Jazz.’” [2]

The result, according to Stamp and Scott’s peers at the time of Battersea’s completion, was a “triumphant success” due to Scott’s development of a chimney design and an external facade that “succeeded in humanizing the great bulk of the monster without denying its sublime scale or industrial character.”[3]  Scott’s work on Battersea Power Station illustrated his rejection of the aggressive minimalism of the Modernists, who he claimed prescribed “the same austerity and bleak absence of ornament for all buildings” regardless of program or function.  Scott instead sought a ‘middle way’ that utilized older design elements while still representing the technologies of the age in which his architecture was constructed. [4] Scott’s use of classical design techniques and development of the ‘jazz-moderne’ style seen in the facade, coupled with the use of modern materials and the relationship between the power station’s immense scale and the sublime, led to the development of this architectural icon that links the city of London to its past architectural and industrial history.

What makes the Bankside and Battersea Power Stations so successful – as “cathedrals of power” and London landmarks – is the quality of Giles Gilbert Scott’s forms and ornament, able to blend together traditional and modern design, along with their sublime scale. But do these architectural qualities alone make the two structures monuments, or their characteristics monumental? It relatively easy to examine a structure like Liverpool Cathedral and consider it a monument, with its sublime scale, elegant ornamental work, and its clearly religious function, evoking the timeless quality of the divine often associated with monumental structures. But while it is certainly not the case that all monuments must have a religious component, a definition of a secular monument is much harder to develop. An examination of the architectural theory surrounding the concept is needed attempt to outline a broader understanding of monumentality, so that the status of Bankside and Battersea can be assessed. 

[1] Marcus Binny. The Colossus of Battersea: a report to save Britain's heritage. (London: Save Britain's Heritage).