The new works will be digitally printed onto optically clear vinyl and applied to the glazed window & door screens of 10 ward rooms throughout the building.
The work is being manufactured and installed to my designs by Guardian Window Film.
The draft designs for the digitally printed vinyl manifestations to the glazed curtain wall at CentralChelmsford was approved some time ago, but I have omitted to post any images for some obscure reason !
Here they are ! –
In a similar approach as that adopted for my recent manifestation project at Sheffield Hallam University, which is a print-white only process, layering transparent & opaque detail onto optically clear vinyl. This project is being delivered in collaboration with VGL Ltd
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.
Tuesday 16th September 2014, Oxford Churchill Hospital, DTU, Cancer Centre I came up to Oxford today to review the installation of the wall-covering artwork along with VGL and the Trust Arts Coordinator, Ruth Charity. The DTU is an oncology & haematology day unit delivering chemotherapy & other cancer related treatments. The staff delivering this service are the most dedicated and hardworking group of people. How they have made time to collaborate and input into this project has been truly brilliant and a pertinent and sharp reminder that projects such as this succeed because of a positive buy in & contribution by staff and stakeholders alike. The work is created around a central core ‘island’ of offices and consulting rooms about which day treatment chemotherapy services are delivered. Most of the chairs and beds face onto this central island, meaning that most patients spend hours at a time over many weeks or even years staring at dull, blank walls, during treatment, rather than out of the windows behind them, which incidentally are too high to see through. A concept approach was developed to change this dull & monotonous view into a contemplative and softly illuminated abstract vista, interrupted by the suggested shadows of overhanging branches and foliage with dappled light breaking through.
Tuesday, August 2nd 2014 – Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield Hallam University. Today I attended on site to review the Phase 1 glazing manifestation artwork installations for myself and meet with VGL who were on site to view the works in tandem with the main contractor, Graham Construction. I was also meeting with the University Clients to review the final scope for the Phase 2 installation of artwork. The building now appears to be semi open for use – but still going through various procedures and protocols, I suppose to ensure all goes smoothly once the mass of students arrive later this month! Great not to have to gear up with PPE. The building is looking amazing. Graham & HLM have done a wonderful job. External landscape is almost completed. The East Elevation of the building has an amazing aspect. It was a clear blue-sky day with lots of sun, which are good conditions for looking at the manifestations, as they are more likely to cast great shadows, which add considerably to the impact and variation within the works.
The West Elevation rain screen is really quite reflective in strong sun. Athough this is a painted grey finish, it is glossy and can appear metallic. The exposed Rockpanel material beneath the colour coat has now really darkened from the earlier yellow colour. The surface is more subtle, but richer in appearance. The impact is muted from afar, but the details really begin to emergeon the approach.
This is the three storey central atrium space and ‘Heart of the Campus’. The client had originally commissioned artwork manifestations to much of the visible glazing, but on reflection, the transparency and legibility of the interior spaces & architectural form may have been compromised and it was decided to omit them from the project. The artwork manifestations to the ground floor exterior curtain wall glazing, linking the East and North entrances, is still being commissioned as the Phase 2 works.
Tuesday 26th August 2014 Several images of the installation have just come in from VGL ‘s installers. These are low res images. I will be making a trip up to Sheffield in the next week or so to review the site prior to the Phase 2 works being undertaken. I will hopefully get more detailed images too !
Nightingale Architects have made available some new images of the project at The Whiteleaf Centre, Aylesbury. This particular image is of the large meeting room in the resource centre. The digitally printed artwork manufactured by Guardian is applied to the glazing screen. When the sun is strong, this creates an additional and fleeting, ephemeral extension of the artwork cast in shadow upon the floor and adjacent walls.
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.