Sheffield\'s ups and downs

16 Aug 2005

Sheffield University’s School of architecture is one of the country’s leading schools. Its diploma course is run across several studios organised around research topics. Tim Abrahams took a closer look at one of the studios run by IDE-A. Studio Seven investigated how augmenting the existing infrastructure might help Yorkshire’s economy develop.

To get to Sheffield University’s Summer Exhibition its best to travel by paternoster. This “continuously moving conveyance” is a motor driven belt of buckets that normally disperses students two at a time all the way up Sheffield University’s Arts Tower. It has no doors and allows you a glimpse of all of the thirteen floors of the building before you arrive with a leap into the foyer of the architecture department. On the way it passes the intriguing prospect of the Luxembourg Studies department on Floor 10. It’s tempting to get off and have a look around.
Floor 14 however, is our goal, and in particular, the work of the final DipArch students that Sheffield University’s lauded School of Architecture. Next year’s post-graduates will leave the school with an M.Arch. They will however have passed through the studio system which Russell Light, co-ordinator of the M.Arch believes accounts for the school’s success. “The studios aren’t organised around personalities as is the case with the schools in London. But around research topics,” says Russell Light, who is also leader of a studio that reflects his interest in the re-use, rather than simple conservation of historic buildings.
To us, however, it is studio seven, that most obviously reflects why Sheffield was judged as a \'5\' in research and an \'excellent\' in teaching, in the government’s latest education assessments - the highest achieved by any UK School of Architecture. John Nordon and Matthew Margretts lead the studio. They met at Newcastle but are now partners at IDE-A in London and their personal experiences of travelling up and down the A1 or the main rail line, through Yorkshire led them to open up a whole field of research possibilities. “The area between these routes was unknown to us. We wanted to investigate if this could be used as an area which could draw people into the region who would otherwise pass through it on these two ‘Yorkshire bypasses’,” says Nordon.
More importantly the work also reflects the way in which the department strives to engage with the world outside. Indeed the idea for the studio was honed in discussion with Alan Simpson, the Urban Renaissance Champion at Yorkshire Forward who worked closely with Alsop on the Supercity concept, in which the vast M62 corridor is seen as a single entity, with inhabitants who live in Liverpool, shop in Leeds and go clubbing in Manchester. Simpson has gone on to expand this search for a sense of place to the regional level. IDE-A would like their studio to play into this wider debate and they have collated their experiences into a document to be analysed by Simpson and his colleagues at a later stage.
The course began with a small-scale project to create an intervention along a theme that would be later pursued on a broader scale. These short 6 week projects are standard for the degree course and are introduced to stimulate the students imagination and give them a basic impression of the studio’s area of concern. Mark Swinburne, who later won the Brian Wragg Prize in Architectural Draughtmanship for his scheme for a regional assembly. He began however with an idea for a theatrical intervention which discussed political issues specific to the region, and a means of relaying this back to political representatives. This carried through into the regional assembly scheme.
Interestingly Swinburne doesn’t feel that the defeat of the movement for regional assemblies turns his project into an obsolete although beautifully rendered project. “I think in many ways the issues about the physical relationship between decision makers and their public this project raises become more important,” he says. His project incorporates the analysis of pedestrian flows through an existing square in York. The building would preserve these active routes and place the dead areas of political administration within them.
In essence, Swinburne has explored the concerns of the studio’s regional focus in his building; how do you encourage individuals on a fixed journey into an activity or environment they had never considered before, with the added benefit this has to the inhabitants of the dead space. A quick survey of the studio’s work shows that the majority of schemes are built on or above the transport infrastructure and only two within the sliver of Yorkshire that lies between the A1 to the West and the GNER mainline to the East. One of these was an international writer’s centre. “The centre is a small scale, high-end project which would not alter the infrastructure to the area greatly, by drawing in massive numbers,” says Norton.
Ross Bowman’s proposal for a renovation of an existing Travelodge at Scotch Corner is a fine example of the studio’s central concerns. Its external form addresses the road, and draws the eye up the slip road for the A66 turn off. Internally the view is out to the landscape beyond. “Scotch Corner got its name from the near meeting of two Roman roads, but now it’s a pretty non-descript place with a well-known name. This is about returning some sense of identity to it,” says Bowman. His plan reorders the prefab modules of the extant Travelodge into a new floating lozenge, which expresses the excitement of travel and the part the site plays in a wider infrastructure.
Bowman’s six-week project explored the relationship of smaller stations on the main arterial rail route. Bowman created signs to lesser known towns. “Often you can’t even read the name of some of the places you pass through at high speed. The signs took into account the perception of the passing viewer. The place names were broken up and turned into forms that were sculptural to those who appreciated them from a static position and as a coherent word to those who read them at high speed. Indeed if there is a practical means of breaking out of our iconic fixation, this scrutiny of the region or site through the infrastructure around provides hope not just of better architecture but of stylistic progression.
The conclusions that Nordon and Magretts have extrapolated from the studio make for very interesting reading, striking a bold contrast as they do with the Alsop M62 corridor scheme. “We discovered that this section of land which traverses the rural south and industrial north of Yorkshire is actually operates at a regional level as a spacer,” says Nordon, describing the area as “the secret garden of Yorkshire”. It is strange to read of a research project into potential development that doesn’t recommend great swathes of development, but that with a couple of qualifications is what IDE-A passed on to Yorkshire Forward.
The development of the infrastructure or the corridor next to the infrastructure is vital. The majority of the schemes which Studio 7 came up with are situated on the infrastructure. These would be covered by current development programmes or indeed the commercial imperative. However, Nordon and Magretts have suggested that the area around Ferrybridge, where their sliver of land intersects the Alsop corridor, is worthy of further study. As its very name suggests this has long been an important, travel interchange. Indeed, the cooling towers of the Power Station are one of the rare landmarks through the flatlands of southern Yorkshire. Although there is a greater appreciation of the monuments of our industrial heritage this area can clearly be developed.
The most interesting concept however, and the one that appears to have interested Yorkshire Forward most is the idea of “a park” in all it’s form, industrial, housing and wildlife becomes the dominant theme of organisation. The Great North National Park is an area perhaps for future studios to enter the debate. In the meantime the architectural potential for functioning commercially viable gateways to the region is real. Some excellent examples of these are provided by the students. Whatever form of conveyance you pass through on, you will know exactly where you are, and may even be encouraged to step off it in order to explore.
Of course, this studio was just one of eight fascinating, and largely successful studios completed by this final year of DipArch final years. It does however highlight what Sheffield does best. Studio 4 looked at 3 different sites in North Ryedale which looked at planning for housing developments and civic centres in a flood plain, playing again into the real development concerns in a local area. Indeed the only question mark, despite the quality of the draughtsmanship on display and the sensitive research made by a number of the students, was the studio that worked on interventions for women’s collectives in Dakar in Senegal. Do impoverished West Africans really need a cyber-learning centre?
For once this set of final years students work, seems, well academic. Elsewhere this collection of work bubbles over with potential, a tangible sense of optimism and desire to make a well –considered mark. Russell Light, believes that this is a result of their Live scheme, where students are thrown into the real world in the first weeks of the year to create a very real project. This year students worked at Prince Edward Primary School on a play scheme. It sounds trite but the considered intervention of the students imbues there final projects with a rigour that is – in general terms – lacking in other schools in the North.
Perhaps that has something to do with Sheffield itself. Once one has descended the paternoster and moved out into the university district it is clear that the impetus from the city is coming from the university district. New buildings are tumbling out of the institutions, Faculties Management Office – a new Centre for Research Into Free Masonry and a new Learning Resources Centre are planned on the main roundabout, which the university would dominate where it not for a new office development proposed in the same area.
Standing on – yes - Paternoster Row, the National Centre for Popular Music is as a monument to the kind of invasive over-ambition for a region that the School of Architecture, and particularly IDE-A’s work is counselling against. Hopefully the slow overspill of ideas from students of the region will continue to inform the ambition of Yorkshire’s civic leaders.
Ups and downs Sheffield University’s School of architecture is one of the country’s leading schools.
Its diploma course is run across several studios organised around research topics. Tim Abrahams took a closer look at one of the studios run by IDE-A. Studio Seven investigated how augmenting the existing infrastructure might help Yorkshire’s economy develop.

To get to Sheffield University’s Summer Exhibition its best to travel by paternoster. This “continuously moving conveyance” is a motor driven belt of buckets that normally disperses students two at a time all the way up Sheffield University’s Arts Tower. It has no doors and allows you a glimpse of all of the thirteen floors of the building before you arrive with a leap into the foyer of the architecture department. On the way it passes the intriguing prospect of the Luxembourg Studies department on Floor 10. It’s tempting to get off and have a look around.
Floor 14 however, is our goal, and in particular, the work of the final DipArch students that Sheffield University’s lauded School of Architecture. Next year’s post-graduates will leave the school with an M.Arch. They will however have passed through the studio system which Russell Light, co-ordinator of the M.Arch believes accounts for the school’s success. “The studios aren’t organised around personalities as is the case with the schools in London. But around research topics,” says Russell Light, who is also leader of a studio that reflects his interest in the re-use, rather than simple conservation of historic buildings.
To us, however, it is studio seven, that most obviously reflects why Sheffield was judged as a \'5\' in research and an \'excellent\' in teaching, in the government’s latest education assessments - the highest achieved by any UK School of Architecture. John Nordon and Matthew Margretts lead the studio. They met at Newcastle but are now partners at IDE-A in London and their personal experiences of travelling up and down the A1 or the main rail line, through Yorkshire led them to open up a whole field of research possibilities. “The area between these routes was unknown to us. We wanted to investigate if this could be used as an area which could draw people into the region who would otherwise pass through it on these two ‘Yorkshire bypasses’,” says Nordon.
More importantly the work also reflects the way in which the department strives to engage with the world outside. Indeed the idea for the studio was honed in discussion with Alan Simpson, the Urban Renaissance Champion at Yorkshire Forward who worked closely with Alsop on the Supercity concept, in which the vast M62 corridor is seen as a single entity, with inhabitants who live in Liverpool, shop in Leeds and go clubbing in Manchester. Simpson has gone on to expand this search for a sense of place to the regional level. IDE-A would like their studio to play into this wider debate and they have collated their experiences into a document to be analysed by Simpson and his colleagues at a later stage.
The course began with a small-scale project to create an intervention along a theme that would be later pursued on a broader scale. These short 6 week projects are standard for the degree course and are introduced to stimulate the students imagination and give them a basic impression of the studio’s area of concern. Mark Swinburne, who later won the Brian Wragg Prize in Architectural Draughtmanship for his scheme for a regional assembly. He began however with an idea for a theatrical intervention which discussed political issues specific to the region, and a means of relaying this back to political representatives. This carried through into the regional assembly scheme.
Interestingly Swinburne doesn’t feel that the defeat of the movement for regional assemblies turns his project into an obsolete although beautifully rendered project. “I think in many ways the issues about the physical relationship between decision makers and their public this project raises become more important,” he says. His project incorporates the analysis of pedestrian flows through an existing square in York. The building would preserve these active routes and place the dead areas of political administration within them.
In essence, Swinburne has explored the concerns of the studio’s regional focus in his building; how do you encourage individuals on a fixed journey into an activity or environment they had never considered before, with the added benefit this has to the inhabitants of the dead space. A quick survey of the studio’s work shows that the majority of schemes are built on or above the transport infrastructure and only two within the sliver of Yorkshire that lies between the A1 to the West and the GNER mainline to the East. One of these was an international writer’s centre. “The centre is a small scale, high-end project which would not alter the infrastructure to the area greatly, by drawing in massive numbers,” says Norton.
Ross Bowman’s proposal for a renovation of an existing Travelodge at Scotch Corner is a fine example of the studio’s central concerns. Its external form addresses the road, and draws the eye up the slip road for the A66 turn off. Internally the view is out to the landscape beyond. “Scotch Corner got its name from the near meeting of two Roman roads, but now it’s a pretty non-descript place with a well-known name. This is about returning some sense of identity to it,” says Bowman. His plan reorders the prefab modules of the extant Travelodge into a new floating lozenge, which expresses the excitement of travel and the part the site plays in a wider infrastructure.
Bowman’s six-week project explored the relationship of smaller stations on the main arterial rail route. Bowman created signs to lesser known towns. “Often you can’t even read the name of some of the places you pass through at high speed. The signs took into account the perception of the passing viewer. The place names were broken up and turned into forms that were sculptural to those who appreciated them from a static position and as a coherent word to those who read them at high speed. Indeed if there is a practical means of breaking out of our iconic fixation, this scrutiny of the region or site through the infrastructure around provides hope not just of better architecture but of stylistic progression.
The conclusions that Nordon and Magretts have extrapolated from the studio make for very interesting reading, striking a bold contrast as they do with the Alsop M62 corridor scheme. “We discovered that this section of land which traverses the rural south and industrial north of Yorkshire is actually operates at a regional level as a spacer,” says Nordon, describing the area as “the secret garden of Yorkshire”. It is strange to read of a research project into potential development that doesn’t recommend great swathes of development, but that with a couple of qualifications is what IDE-A passed on to Yorkshire Forward.
The development of the infrastructure or the corridor next to the infrastructure is vital. The majority of the schemes which Studio 7 came up with are situated on the infrastructure. These would be covered by current development programmes or indeed the commercial imperative. However, Nordon and Magretts have suggested that the area around Ferrybridge, where their sliver of land intersects the Alsop corridor, is worthy of further study. As its very name suggests this has long been an important, travel interchange. Indeed, the cooling towers of the Power Station are one of the rare landmarks through the flatlands of southern Yorkshire. Although there is a greater appreciation of the monuments of our industrial heritage this area can clearly be developed.
The most interesting concept however, and the one that appears to have interested Yorkshire Forward most is the idea of “a park” in all it’s form, industrial, housing and wildlife becomes the dominant theme of organisation. The Great North National Park is an area perhaps for future studios to enter the debate. In the meantime the architectural potential for functioning commercially viable gateways to the region is real. Some excellent examples of these are provided by the students. Whatever form of conveyance you pass through on, you will know exactly where you are, and may even be encouraged to step off it in order to explore.
Of course, this studio was just one of eight fascinating, and largely successful studios completed by this final year of DipArch final years. It does however highlight what Sheffield does best. Studio 4 looked at 3 different sites in North Ryedale which looked at planning for housing developments and civic centres in a flood plain, playing again into the real development concerns in a local area. Indeed the only question mark, despite the quality of the draughtsmanship on display and the sensitive research made by a number of the students, was the studio that worked on interventions for women’s collectives in Dakar in Senegal. Do impoverished West Africans really need a cyber-learning centre?
For once this set of final years students work, seems, well academic. Elsewhere this collection of work bubbles over with potential, a tangible sense of optimism and desire to make a well –considered mark. Russell Light, believes that this is a result of their Live scheme, where students are thrown into the real world in the first weeks of the year to create a very real project. This year students worked at Prince Edward Primary School on a play scheme. It sounds trite but the considered intervention of the students imbues there final projects with a rigour that is – in general terms – lacking in other schools in the North.
Perhaps that has something to do with Sheffield itself. Once one has descended the paternoster and moved out into the university district it is clear that the impetus from the city is coming from the university district. New buildings are tumbling out of the institutions, Faculties Management Office – a new Centre for Research Into Free Masonry and a new Learning Resources Centre are planned on the main roundabout, which the university would dominate where it not for a new office development proposed in the same area.
Standing on – yes - Paternoster Row, the National Centre for Popular Music is as a monument to the kind of invasive over-ambition for a region that the School of Architecture, and particularly IDE-A’s work is counselling against. Hopefully the slow overspill of ideas from students of the region will continue to inform the ambition of Yorkshire’s civic leaders.
Ups and downs Sheffield University’s School of architecture is one of the country’s leading schools.
Its diploma course is run across several studios organised around research topics. Tim Abrahams took a closer look at one of the studios run by IDE-A. Studio Seven investigated how augmenting the existing infrastructure might help Yorkshire’s economy develop.

To get to Sheffield University’s Summer Exhibition its best to travel by paternoster. This “continuously moving conveyance” is a motor driven belt of buckets that normally disperses students two at a time all the way up Sheffield University’s Arts Tower. It has no doors and allows you a glimpse of all of the thirteen floors of the building before you arrive with a leap into the foyer of the architecture department. On the way it passes the intriguing prospect of the Luxembourg Studies department on Floor 10. It’s tempting to get off and have a look around.
Floor 14 however, is our goal, and in particular, the work of the final DipArch students that Sheffield University’s lauded School of Architecture. Next year’s post-graduates will leave the school with an M.Arch. They will however have passed through the studio system which Russell Light, co-ordinator of the M.Arch believes accounts for the school’s success. “The studios aren’t organised around personalities as is the case with the schools in London. But around research topics,” says Russell Light, who is also leader of a studio that reflects his interest in the re-use, rather than simple conservation of historic buildings.
To us, however, it is studio seven, that most obviously reflects why Sheffield was judged as a \'5\' in research and an \'excellent\' in teaching, in the government’s latest education assessments - the highest achieved by any UK School of Architecture. John Nordon and Matthew Margretts lead the studio. They met at Newcastle but are now partners at IDE-A in London and their personal experiences of travelling up and down the A1 or the main rail line, through Yorkshire led them to open up a whole field of research possibilities. “The area between these routes was unknown to us. We wanted to investigate if this could be used as an area which could draw people into the region who would otherwise pass through it on these two ‘Yorkshire bypasses’,” says Nordon.
More importantly the work also reflects the way in which the department strives to engage with the world outside. Indeed the idea for the studio was honed in discussion with Alan Simpson, the Urban Renaissance Champion at Yorkshire Forward who worked closely with Alsop on the Supercity concept, in which the vast M62 corridor is seen as a single entity, with inhabitants who live in Liverpool, shop in Leeds and go clubbing in Manchester. Simpson has gone on to expand this search for a sense of place to the regional level. IDE-A would like their studio to play into this wider debate and they have collated their experiences into a document to be analysed by Simpson and his colleagues at a later stage.
The course began with a small-scale project to create an intervention along a theme that would be later pursued on a broader scale. These short 6 week projects are standard for the degree course and are introduced to stimulate the students imagination and give them a basic impression of the studio’s area of concern. Mark Swinburne, who later won the Brian Wragg Prize in Architectural Draughtmanship for his scheme for a regional assembly. He began however with an idea for a theatrical intervention which discussed political issues specific to the region, and a means of relaying this back to political representatives. This carried through into the regional assembly scheme.
Interestingly Swinburne doesn’t feel that the defeat of the movement for regional assemblies turns his project into an obsolete although beautifully rendered project. “I think in many ways the issues about the physical relationship between decision makers and their public this project raises become more important,” he says. His project incorporates the analysis of pedestrian flows through an existing square in York. The building would preserve these active routes and place the dead areas of political administration within them.
In essence, Swinburne has explored the concerns of the studio’s regional focus in his building; how do you encourage individuals on a fixed journey into an activity or environment they had never considered before, with the added benefit this has to the inhabitants of the dead space. A quick survey of the studio’s work shows that the majority of schemes are built on or above the transport infrastructure and only two within the sliver of Yorkshire that lies between the A1 to the West and the GNER mainline to the East. One of these was an international writer’s centre. “The centre is a small scale, high-end project which would not alter the infrastructure to the area greatly, by drawing in massive numbers,” says Norton.
Ross Bowman’s proposal for a renovation of an existing Travelodge at Scotch Corner is a fine example of the studio’s central concerns. Its external form addresses the road, and draws the eye up the slip road for the A66 turn off. Internally the view is out to the landscape beyond. “Scotch Corner got its name from the near meeting of two Roman roads, but now it’s a pretty non-descript place with a well-known name. This is about returning some sense of identity to it,” says Bowman. His plan reorders the prefab modules of the extant Travelodge into a new floating lozenge, which expresses the excitement of travel and the part the site plays in a wider infrastructure.
Bowman’s six-week project explored the relationship of smaller stations on the main arterial rail route. Bowman created signs to lesser known towns. “Often you can’t even read the name of some of the places you pass through at high speed. The signs took into account the perception of the passing viewer. The place names were broken up and turned into forms that were sculptural to those who appreciated them from a static position and as a coherent word to those who read them at high speed. Indeed if there is a practical means of breaking out of our iconic fixation, this scrutiny of the region or site through the infrastructure around provides hope not just of better architecture but of stylistic progression.
The conclusions that Nordon and Magretts have extrapolated from the studio make for very interesting reading, striking a bold contrast as they do with the Alsop M62 corridor scheme. “We discovered that this section of land which traverses the rural south and industrial north of Yorkshire is actually operates at a regional level as a spacer,” says Nordon, describing the area as “the secret garden of Yorkshire”. It is strange to read of a research project into potential development that doesn’t recommend great swathes of development, but that with a couple of qualifications is what IDE-A passed on to Yorkshire Forward.
The development of the infrastructure or the corridor next to the infrastructure is vital. The majority of the schemes which Studio 7 came up with are situated on the infrastructure. These would be covered by current development programmes or indeed the commercial imperative. However, Nordon and Magretts have suggested that the area around Ferrybridge, where their sliver of land intersects the Alsop corridor, is worthy of further study. As its very name suggests this has long been an important, travel interchange. Indeed, the cooling towers of the Power Station are one of the rare landmarks through the flatlands of southern Yorkshire. Although there is a greater appreciation of the monuments of our industrial heritage this area can clearly be developed.
The most interesting concept however, and the one that appears to have interested Yorkshire Forward most is the idea of “a park” in all it’s form, industrial, housing and wildlife becomes the dominant theme of organisation. The Great North National Park is an area perhaps for future studios to enter the debate. In the meantime the architectural potential for functioning commercially viable gateways to the region is real. Some excellent examples of these are provided by the students. Whatever form of conveyance you pass through on, you will know exactly where you are, and may even be encouraged to step off it in order to explore.
Of course, this studio was just one of eight fascinating, and largely successful studios completed by this final year of DipArch final years. It does however highlight what Sheffield does best. Studio 4 looked at 3 different sites in North Ryedale which looked at planning for housing developments and civic centres in a flood plain, playing again into the real development concerns in a local area. Indeed the only question mark, despite the quality of the draughtsmanship on display and the sensitive research made by a number of the students, was the studio that worked on interventions for women’s collectives in Dakar in Senegal. Do impoverished West Africans really need a cyber-learning centre?
For once this set of final years students work, seems, well academic. Elsewhere this collection of work bubbles over with potential, a tangible sense of optimism and desire to make a well –considered mark. Russell Light, believes that this is a result of their Live scheme, where students are thrown into the real world in the first weeks of the year to create a very real project. This year students worked at Prince Edward Primary School on a play scheme. It sounds trite but the considered intervention of the students imbues there final projects with a rigour that is – in general terms – lacking in other schools in the North.
Perhaps that has something to do with Sheffield itself. Once one has descended the paternoster and moved out into the university district it is clear that the impetus from the city is coming from the university district. New buildings are tumbling out of the institutions, Faculties Management Office – a new Centre for Research Into Free Masonry and a new Learning Resources Centre are planned on the main roundabout, which the university would dominate where it not for a new office development proposed in the same area.
Standing on – yes - Paternoster Row, the National Centre for Popular Music is as a monument to the kind of invasive over-ambition for a region that the School of Architecture, and particularly IDE-A’s work is counselling against. Hopefully the slow overspill of ideas from students of the region will continue to inform the ambition of Yorkshire’s civic leaders.