AJ Student Prize 2023: University of Sheffield

About the Sheffield School of Architecture

Location Sheffield | Courses BA (Hons) Architecture, BA (Hons) Architecture and Landscape, MEng Structural Engineering and Architecture, MArch, MArch Collaborative Practice, MArch Architecture and Landscape Architecture  | Head of school Renata Tyszczuk | Full-time tutors 22 | Part-time tutors 36 | Students 585 | Staff to student ratio 1:12

Undergraduate

Yiming Zhou

Course BA (Hons) Architecture
Studio/unit brief Art Shelter, Hull
Project title A Series of Rooms – A New Art Gallery in Kingston upon Hull

Project description This is a proposal for a new art gallery in Hull. Through the creation of a series of rooms with varying degrees of connection with the city and history, Hull’s urban fragments and forgotten industrial past are revealed and woven together as an urban collage. Reception facilities and community spaces are located on the ground floor, around two courtyards, with layers of thresholds that mark the transition between city and river. Temporary exhibition and collection galleries are on the first floor, straddling new build and existing. The collection gallery, characterised by use of light and framing, creates a sense of wandering to ‘non-realistic’ places through the juxtaposition of the post-industrial riverscape and Hull’s maritime past depicted in the ship portrait painter John Ward’s paintings. A tower on the river’s edge frames views of the city’s civic towers and industrial landmarks along the river.

Tutor citation This is a sophisticated and sensitive scheme, which evolved through a process of constantly exploring, challenging, making and refining. Careful research of the context has led to a scheme that creates a series of journeys and routes for visitors. At its heart it is joyous and playful. Emily Pieters

Postgraduate

Max Bridge, Dimitar Zhelev

Course MArch
Studio/unit brief Architecture as Gesture
Project title The Tortoise & The Hare

Project description In a time of mass production, consumption and emphasis on quantity over quality, the built environment has become more devoid of human character, imagination and generosity. Challenging this culture of speed within Sheffield’s commercial heart, this public house takes residence in one of the unloved and forgotten Victorian buildings of Fargate to provide alternative refuge from the busyness of fast-paced life. Reinterpreting traditional spatial identities associated with the British pub typology within a theme of ‘slowness’, this pub provides spaces to encourage meaningful moments. Using a ‘slow’ design methodology, the pub, its spaces, objects and atmospheres are born from shared stories that emerge from using its board games. Inspired by Orwell’s essay The Moon Under Water, the pub attempts to paint itself as ‘perfect’ through collective imagination of players where its presence is not bound by physical architecture but rather its legacy and history. 

Tutor citation In foregrounding the aspects most interacted with at human scale, Max and Dimitar render architecture as the mechanism of memory and the catalyst of belonging. The fact that this project has been the product of more than a singular ego and manages to evoke the feminine so powerfully, through methodology and theory, means it feels like an important event in today’s world, especially within the context of a university project. Michael Badu