---
type: study
date: '2022-10-01T00:00:00.000Z'
title: Battersea Power Station Media Room
description: Learning Unity from documentation at 3am to ship an installation for London's landmark reopening.
slug: battersea
isArtifactItem: true
client: Lusion (for Squint/Opera)
mode: COM
thumbnailMedia: B1D1.webp
isConfidential: false
---

Battersea Power Station carried London's electricity for half a century before falling silent in 1983. Four decades of decay, failed schemes, and public imagination transformed the building into something beyond architecture—a monument to industrial memory and urban possibility. Its 2022 reopening posed a question most heritage projects avoid: how do you honour what a place meant while making room for what it becomes?

Squint/Opera designed the Experience Room—an interpretive threshold where visitors encounter the building's story before dispersing into the development. They contracted Lusion for the interactive installation. Lusion contracted me.

The problem: I'd never used Unity. The deadline didn't care. For a month I worked until 3 or 4am most nights, reading documentation, posting in forums, building the real-time system piece by piece. No AI coding assistants existed yet—just documentation, community answers, and the pressure of a fixed opening date. I led the project and wrote the code that now runs in the Experience Room, greeting visitors entering one of London's most improbable resurrections.

The installation aimed for a third position between embalming the past and ignoring it entirely: reinvention as continuation of essential character. A building that once converted energy for a city now converts attention, gathering people into a space still defined by monumental ambition. Technical architecture served that idea—interactive content responding to presence, heritage interpretation that doesn't feel like a museum panel.

What I learned: constraints reveal capacity you didn't know you had. The work shipped. It still runs. And the experience of building something real under impossible pressure—learning in public, solving problems in real time—shaped how I approach every engagement since.

[B1D1.webp](https://storage.u29dc.com/media/B1D1.webp)

[B1A2.webm](https://storage.u29dc.com/media/B1A2.webm)

[B1C1.webp](https://storage.u29dc.com/media/B1C1.webp)

[B1A1.webm](https://storage.u29dc.com/media/B1A1.webm)

[B1D2.webp](https://storage.u29dc.com/media/B1D2.webp)

---

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