My colleague Jenni Muston at Rockpanel, has sent me some wonderful new images taken of the ‘Heart of the Campus’ facade artwork by the photographer Jason Newsome.
He has really managed to get some brilliant shots in varying light, which show off the variations in surface quality and light reflection. Thanks to both!
The West Elevation artwork has a great impact on the building facade.
The rainscreen artwork was produced in collaboration with Rockpanel and The Cutting Room in Huntingdon. Project Contractors:GRAHAM – Project Architects: HLM Sheffield.
Works are well underway by the Ashfield Group to manufacture and supply the artwork step details to the project. The double height steps in York Stone are being inset with a darker granite text detail set into the face of the riser, which is part of the art interpretation on site. These double height steps will also have a slatted timber top, which creates ad hoc seating within the main sequence of steps at the southern end of the site. The timber will also carry cnc routed text.
The timber seating units for The Gate – a set of 6 radius benches with cnc routed text – are currently being installed at the Central Chelmsford site. The benches are being manufactured by City Squared in Leeds & installed by Ground Control. The designs were developed in collaboration with City Squared. The cnc routed text refers to the history, location and memory of the space & is defined by the adjacency of the Anne Knight Building, which has been refurbished & is considered the anchor building of the development site.
507 new homes as well as retail and offices will make up the new development. The project is delivering a blueprint for a new community in Chelmsford.
The site has a number of key buildings once part of Anglia Ruskin University, which are being partly or wholly retained and refurbished. These are the Frederick Chancellor Building of 1905 and the Law Building of 1931.
One of the most historic & resonant as well as the earliest buildings on the site is the Grade II listedAnne Knightbuilding, a former Friends Meeting House from 1824. Named after one of Chelmsford’s most distinguished women, Anne Knight 1786 – 1862.
The view of The Gate with its blue black brick curved elevation. This area is intended as a public open space, extending the forecourt and public realm of Chelmsford Station. The ground floor elevations are glazed and the interiors will be used as retail and food outlets.
Looking South, through the aperture into The Place. The elevation of The Gate is dynamic & brooding. The crisp detailing is pared down. A facade of cantilevered black balconies appear to jut out from deep into the interior of the building from recessed windows.
Looking south towards Central Park through The Place. The main pedestrian route will be on the left of this image, with the remaining site will be landscaped as a formal courtyard garden for residents and visitors alike
The view north, towards the Station from within The Place
These are both samples of text to be used in the interpretive artwork which is embedded throughout the site. The sample on the left is York Stone with inset water jet cut grey granite, by Ashfield Ltd. Inset text such as this is used for step risers at the south of the site. The sandblasted sample on the right is part of a Royal Green granite paving supplied by Hardscape , called The Stream which runs continuously through the site north to south. Both interventions are based on contextual and site specific research I undertook.
The Central Chelmsford development has been in progress on site since 2012. I was commissioned to join the team as project artist in January of this year.
You can hear more on the project via this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orYUpbnacis
The site has a number of key buildings which were once a part of of Anglia Ruskin University. 507 new homes as well as retail and offices will make up the new development. The project is delivering a new community in Chelmsford.
One of the most historic & resonant as well as the earliest buildings on the site is the Grade II listed Anne Knight building, a former Friends Meeting House from 1824. Named after one of Chelmsford’s most distinguished women, Anne Knight 1786 – 1862. Anne Knight was a Quaker and a stalwart Anti Abolitionist, attending the World Anti Slavery Convention meeting held in London in 1840. Her views and correspondence on women’s rights led to her publishing what is considered to be the very first leaflet on women’s suffrage in 1847.
I have also responded to the landscape plans and architectural flow & rhythm of the site as well exploring how the various elements & spaces of the site are navigated and used by pedestrians. As the hub of a new community, the communal areas of the development are important places for people to take ownership of.
As well as collaborating with the project team I am also working and collaborating with several manufacturers and specialist contractors such as Hardscape, Ashfield Ltd & City Squared on elements of paving, seating and steps throughout the site, where interventions will be made via cnc routed text into timber and water jet cut and sandblasted granite.
The installation of the Heart of the Campus West Elevation ‘Drawing’ artwork was started on site in November 2013 & is nearing completion.
Project Outline
The images all relate to an external artwork created for a section of the Western Elevation of the Heart of the Campusbuilding, which faces onto Broomgrove Rd in Sheffield.
This elevation functions as a façade rain screen of grey colour-coated 10mm thick panels, manufactured by Rockpanel. It is proposed that the artwork will be formed via cnc routing of this surface, which will expose the base material to a depth of 2mm. When routed, the exposed base material is a greenish yellow, which eventually weathers to a rich brown colour over several weeks.The panels will be invisibly fixed to the sub-base frame & have a joint width of 5mm.
The themes explored in the work are conveyed through dynamic mark making and linear drawing evoking the history of cutlery manufacture in the city and techniques associated with printmaking, engraving, chasing and the evidence of the individual maker. These methodologies have found their way into every nook of the manufactory in Sheffield.
The narrative artwork forms an abstract landscape which can be read either as a vertical landscape or in plan, rather like a map, with forms and shapes redolent of topography, maps, rivers, trees & clouds.
I am working in collaboration with the project team, but more particularly with Mark Durey and his team at The Cutting Room, a company specialising in cnc routing, based in in Huntingdon, Cambs. The cnc process is used here on an architectural scale to create a dynamic façade as a backdrop along Broomgrove Road. They were brilliant to work with and brought so much more to the project than I anticipated. This is the art of collaboration and an excellent project team as previously mentioned, in Sheffield Hallam University, Graham Contractors & HLM Architects.
I was keen from the outset to explore a site-specific response to the project brief. With that in mind I have been researching the many collections and archives housed by Sheffield Museums and Libraries.I am particularly drawn to the history and manufacture of cutlery in the city. Individuals such as Ken Hawley & the wonderful Hawley Collectionat Kelham Island, have made enormous efforts to preserve this legacy.
His keen focus upon the tools of manufacture draw you inexplicably to those individuals directly involved in the process of making & the evidence of the hand crafted & extraordinary skills upon which the wealth of the city was based.
From around 1840 onwards John Watson, a local builder & developer, sponsored the development of an area around Collegiate Crescent. The site was laid out with villas and landscaped in the Gardenesque style. The area rapidly began to house the families of prosperous local industrialists. Many cutlery manufacturers were among them. The area was a draw for wealthy and successful manufacturers from Sheffield – steel & file makers, cutlery manufacturers, printers & publishers.
These are amongst the influencing threads and themes I have worked with.
George Wolstenholme, one of Sheffield’s greatest cutlery manufactures, Master Cutler & owner of the famous Washington Works, built nearby Kenwood House around 1845 with the estate designed by the garden designer Robert Marnock, who also laid out the adjacent Botanic Gardens in the Gardenesque style.
Over the 20th Century much of the area has seen a transition from private residence to educational use primarily by Sheffield Hallam University. The City of Sheffield Teacher Training College was founded on the Collegiate Crescent site in 1905. For the next 60 years or so, the College produced its own publication, The Crescent Magazine. For a long period, the magazine and its frontispiece, was illustrated with linocuts, woodblock prints and other hand tooled printmaking techniques. The effects were dynamic – instant – and very much evident of the hand made. It is unclear whether students or local artists produced the prints, but many of the illustrations are of Collegiate Buildings still extant on the site – and tell stories of events and people directly associated with the College.
The artisan skills extended to sales catalogues & product merchandising. Promotional materials were produced and published locally. The publisher William White lived on Collegiate Crescent in 1861. The printed works of Loxley Brothers & Pawson & Brailsford are much in evidence. The Archives and Collections of Sheffield, including the Hawley, hold many such catalogues – printed locally and beautifully engraved onto copper plates mounted on boxwood by craftsmen with exquisite drawings of knives, forks, files, tools of every variety for distribution to all ends of the earth.
Trade went both ways – with materials arriving into Sheffield from the Empire over. Principally to furnish handles for cutlery manufacture and scales and hafting materials for knives and other cutting tools, the quantities were immense and the sources exotic. Ivory, Mother of Pearl, Brazilian Rosewood, Narwhale, Samba Antlers, Black Buffalo Horn and even Giraffe Bone. In 1878 the storerooms of Joseph Rodgers & Sons held 26 tons of ivory – 2,561 tusks or the equivalent of 1280 Elephants!
During the 19th Century this type of production was a repetitive, highly skilled, hand led process often carried out by small family businesses. The Hawley Collection at Kellam Island is the most amazing resource and repository for the manufacturing minutiae, machinery and hand tools associated with this trade throughout its history. Handling tools worn by use to perfectly fit the makers hand and opening boxes filled with the by products and blanks of a process which may have ended with a Stag Horned carving knife for example is wonderfully evocative.
Without the dedication of people such as Bert Hawley and his team of extraordinary volunteers, this legacy may have been lost to the City, which was for centuries the centre of cutlery manufacture in the country. The heart of the collection is not in its variety or depth or the fact it captures the sheer scale and grinding hard work of production. It is in the hands of its myriad makers that it comes alive. Handling tools, which have probably made millions of repetitive movements over a working lifetime is both powerful & moving. The collection is a vital research tool, drawing both academics and artists to it.
John Ruskin and the Guild of St George – a love of nature, close observation curiosity and drawing –
The visual narrative is extended at other points around the building, most notably on the high glazed curtain wall of the East Elevation Main Entrance facing onto Collegiate Crescent. Here, the bold graphic forms and iconography of the West Elevation respond to the light and open glazed ground floor elevations with a similar language but a much lighter touch, executed in softer, opaque & transparent layers of imagery which first appear as if sandblasted.
To enter the building one has to pass through this ‘veil’ of layered imagery, again exploring the themes outlined above. On bright & sunlit days, these digitally printed surfaces may cast intricate & delicate shadows across the floor of the entrance areas, quietly reminding us all of the continuity and evidence of history surrounding the University, the site and its use.
On Monday 23rd July, the draft designs for the Heart of the Campus project were approved by the board. I am now starting to work with the Cutting Room in Huntingdon to begin sampling the cnc routing process.