Music

Iconic power station from Pink Floyd's 'Animals' is being converted into luxury villas

by Tyler Munro

Welp. This is ironic.

Pink Floyd’s Animals was a scathing commentary of Britain’s tense socio-political climate, riffing off of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and its album art, which featured a pig floating through the Battersea Power Station’s chimneys, is one of the band’s most iconic.

Unfortunately, it’s about to be torn down to make room for, as CNN reports, “luxury villas.”

While the Malaysian developers spearheading the development have hired architects keen on preserving the station’s iconic chimneys, they won’t necessarily be kept.

“Take them away, and you don’t have an icon,” said architect Jim Eyre. “The coal fumes has decayed the concrete, so they have to come down. But we’re going to painstakingly reconstruct them.”

It’s a catch 22, since the structural integrity of the chimneys is likely too dire to ever consider keeping them, but a reconstruction is a compromise that pales only in comparison to the irony of peddling a bougie combination of offices, residences and stores. Still, expect the chimneys to be functional, and fully utilized, once the first phase of construction closes in 2016.

The building is massive, and its rebirth plans to maintain that scope. Unfortunately, they’re also going to keep some of its birthmarks, like graffiti and weather stains. Whoa. Sounds edgy.