will Sheffield University ever surpass its Arts Tower?

It’s 11 years since HLM Architects reclad and remodelled the glass curtain-walled block that is the University of Sheffield’s Arts Tower. At 78m, the iconic tower is still the tallest university building in England. Situated at 12 Bolsover Street, it towers over Western Bank Library to which it is linked, its 22 storeys offering panoramic views over the university campus and out to the Peak District. The Grade II*-listed Modernist symbol, designed by Gollins Melvin Ward (GMW) first opened in 1966 and is famous for its paternoster lift while also being home to Sheffield School of Architecture, one of the UK’s oldest architecture schools, which has occupied its top six floors since the tower’s opening.

Sharing many of the same pared-back aesthetics of the much larger Seagram Building in New York City, this campus asset is arguably the city’s second most famous building after the Park Hill estate.

Sheffield University was formed from three local institutions in 1897 and gained university status in 1905. It has about 27,000 students and is one of the original nine ‘red brick’ universities and a founding member of the Russell Group. Since its inception, its estate has grown to 350,000m² with the campus stretching between the centre and the city’s leafy western suburbs, including student residences, sports facilities, and manufacturing research spaces. Its oldest buildings are the Edwardian Firth Court and the 1904 Sir Frederick Mappin Building, both of which local architect Edward Mitchel Gibbs had a hand in designing.

Like the wider city within which it sits, Sheffield University’s campus is not particularly beautiful and, unlike many other universities, it has few pre-modern monuments by nationally known architects. This partly reflects the smaller scale of the city and its early industries. However, by the 1960s, Sheffield was leading its rivals in both architecture and development, famous for creating several Modernist icons.

Following Park Hill and the Arts Tower, other landmark buildings emerged within the university’s campus, including the Grade II*-listed Western Bank Library, also designed by GMW after a national competition; the lesser known but characterful hexagonal 1970s Geography and Planning Building designed by William Whitfield & Partners; cpmg’s 2004 ICoSS Building; and RMJM’s 2007 pre-patinated copper-clad Information Commons building.

More recently, however, a number of somewhat clunky schemes have characterised a rather less inspiring output. There seems to be the ambition for the campus to become an architectural smörgåsbord, with many schemes lacking the quality of what came before in the 60s and 70s.

The year 2008 saw the completion of Jessop West, a new department bringing together English and History as well as the School of Modern Languages. Promisingly, it was designed by Berlin-based ‘design house’ Sauerbruch Hutton, known for its use of colour in architecture, in collaboration with RMJM. Jessop West is formed of three wings housing the different faculties – differentiated, naturally, by colour. The façades have a repeating woven ‘textile’ pattern of perforated steel panels, allowing natural ventilation. Disappointingly though, it’s a lacklustre translation of Sauerbruch Hutton’s European-style and doesn’t quite meet its ambitious aim of helping unite the campus, partly because of its challenging site next to the University Square roundabout.

It was followed in 2015 by the Diamond, round the corner on Leavygreave Road – iconic, but not for the right reasons. The largest capital investment ever made by the university, the £81 million building for the Faculty of Engineering is so-called because of its shape and the colour of its glass and aluminium façade which, perhaps too literally, takes its reference from the coloured grid patterns of ‘cellular automata’. The huge 19,500m² scheme controversially replaced the Grade II-listed Edwardian wing of the Jessop Hospital Building, which conservation and local groups had unsuccessfully campaigned to save.

Doubling up as a hub for other departments to promote ‘cross-collaboration’, the atrium has curved, suspended pods reminiscent of the late Will Alsop’s architecture but not as good. These inefficiently house IT suites and small seminar rooms. Despite Sheffield Central MP Paul Blomfield commenting that the building would be a ‘jewel in the crown not only for the university itself, but also for the city’, the project was unsurprisingly shortlisted for the 2016 Carbuncle Cup, awarded to the ugliest new building in the UK.

The scheme was designed by Twelve Architects, whose directors emerged from a floundering RMJM in late 2012. The architects worked on the then RIBA stages A-E while still employed at RMJM before landing the design and delivery of the faculty mid-2013.

Completing this uninspiring trio is one of the most recently completed campus new-builds: the Engineering Heartspace, which opened in 2020. Here, AJ100 practice Bond Bryan designed a 12,500m² four-storey glass atrium to link the Grade II-listed Sir Frederick Mappin Building with its 1855 Central Wing. The ironically overengineered curved glass roof is supported on clunky metal ‘trees’ to enclose a courtyard within one of the oldest red brick buildings on the university’s estate. It’s not just insensitive, it also highlights how, often, less is more.

Other ‘gems’ on the campus include Carey Jones and Jefferson Sheard’s 2008 black rubber quilted Sheffield Soundhouse – which has hints of 013, a music venue in Tilberg in The Netherlands – and the Students’ Union building, which in 2013 underwent a inelegant redevelopment by HLM Architects, integrating it with the 1963 University House (part of GMW’s 1953 masterplan) to create a single building.

And there are more projects in the pipeline, including a £65 million Social Sciences Hub, currently on site. Designed by HLM Architects with ‘sustainability at its core’, the scheme became a costly failure before it was even completed when its foundations were found to be inadequate and it had to be demolished.

The replacement building is sited on a former reservoir at the junction of Northumberland Road and Whitham Road. In a rather simplistic architectural metaphor, its form is described as ‘a series of overlapping organic curved floor plates that ebb and flow hinting at the site’s history as an old reservoir’. The façade of staggered glass planes apparently ‘reflects … the multifaceted nature of social sciences’.

On the drawing board is the Central Teaching Laboratory. Twelve Architects – again – with Australia’s BVN Architecture won the university’s ‘restricted’ competition to design the £37 million building in September of this year. The architects will now develop a 6,950m² ‘flexible, multifaceted teaching laboratory’ on a corner site a short distance from Information Commons, apparently aiming to create a new focus for the university’s main Western Bank Campus.

In terms of public realm, the picture is rosier. In 2016 Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS) with Grant Associates produced a ‘spatial’ masterplan for the campus, which involved the development of a public-realm strategy aiming to define the character of the university quarter, while enhancing its integration within the city. This followed the City of Sheffield’s own focus on the city’s public realm, its Gold Route, a pedestrian axis through the city, initiated in the early 2000s by the council to connect key public spaces and buildings but finishing at Leavygreave Road on the campus edge.

In recent years nearly £10 million of funding (supported by the Sheffield City Region Investment Fund) has been channelled towards creating a series of pocket parks and pedestrianised walkways to create a more sustainable, connected, and welcoming campus through urban greening, seen as a key opportunity to celebrate the city-to-university interface.

Insiders say this has hugely improved perceptions of the campus and made it far more walkable and accessible.

The last part of the FCBS masterplan to be delivered was the Concourse, the transformation of the area beneath a major flyover over Western Bank at the heart of the campus and a long-underused 1970s-designed public space linking the students’ union area with the Alfred Denny Building. HLM Architects led a series of interventions including comprehensive lighting, repaving, new furniture and planting. It has been tidied and made safer for students, particularly at night, although perhaps it could have been more ambitious, particularly in making it more useful as an outdoors event venue.

A promised new public park near Broad Lane to improve the courtyards around the Arts Tower and Western Bank major thoroughfare is yet to materialise. However, just completed is the Transformer, a new energy centre for the university by HLM Architects – one of the more unusual projects on the campus. This, along with the Concourse and, surprisingly, Engineering Heartspace, were celebrated locally at the Sheffield Design Awards earlier this month when they collectively took home four prizes.

Despite the successful greening and pedestrianisation of parts of the campus, it’s not clear what the university’s architectural vision is, given that FCBS’s masterplan seems to focus more on loose massing and public space, rather than on the building stock itself.

From one new building (Jessop West) featuring lacklustre aesthetics to another lamely using its programme as direct inspiration (The Diamond), this is an uninspiring way to design new-build additions to a major university campus. Without a clearer masterplan, the contemporary buildings create a mishmash of architecture – one that doesn’t connect to the campus well and that urban greening can’t entirely fix.

Critics complain of a lack of vision in terms of procurement and, perhaps, insufficient use of in-house skills and specialisms from the architecture or engineering departments.

In 2017, the university was blasted by procurement reform campaigners for abandoning its £25 million Pearl contest, wasting the resources and time of 150 bidders. The move was blamed on public funding cuts and Brexit but raised further concerns over the lack of a feasibility study.

Seven months later, it was announced the university was recruiting architects for a pair of frameworks covering small (under £4 million) and large (over £4 million) projects until 2022. It selected seven commercially-minded practices, including HLM, Bond Bryan and Cartwright Pickard.

So where are the more design-led architects? It seems strange that a university with a substantial budget (they did spend £81 million on one building) doesn’t look to a wider breadth of architects. The University of Liverpool selected RIBA Gold Medal-winning O’Donnell + Tuomey for its £23 million architecture school extension in 2019, while earlier this year, the London School of Economics chose David Chipperfield Architects with Feix&Merlin to design its final ‘set piece’ academic building, a highly ambitious retrofit.

So what is the architectural ambition of the University of Sheffield? The university itself argues that its ambition for its estate is one of ‘spatial reduction’ across the campus, led by its determination to get to net-zero. One would automatically think retrofit here, but that’s not particularly been the case.

Separate to net zero goals, it wants to improve its RICS standard of condition from its present 83 per cent and the approach has often been to replace poor-quality accommodation and consolidate its existing campus into less space.

By way of comparison, Sheffield Hallam, the younger of the city’s two universities, straddles two sites in Sheffield with its City Campus located close to the railway station. Unlike Sheffield University, this was constructed mainly during the 60s, with its Owen Building completing in 1967. Its current portfolio of buildings is fairly utilitarian with a shiny exception: its student union building the Hubs – four orbs of stainless steel originally built as the National Centre for Popular Music in 1999 by Branson Coates Architects.

Indeed, Hallam seems to have a slightly more proactive attitude to reusing and updating existing buildings in the city. For example, it converted Sheffield’s Grade II-listed Head Post Office building into the university’s art and design department. The 2015 retrofit by AXIS Architecture retained all the original tiles, flooring, doors, ceiling and wall features, with the ground floor turned into a space for exhibitions and private events. It’s a great example of taking civic architecture and reusing it for an alternative purpose.

Meanwhile, Hallam’s Owen Building, a very functional 1960s design, has been modernised and comprehensively renovated with an atrium linking it to four adjacent buildings, creating a thermally efficient and welcoming space.

Sheffield University has paid some attention to retrofit, the high point being the 2011 remodelling of the Arts Tower, when HLM added double-glazed units and insulated spandrels, updating it ‘with no discernible difference in appearance’. Probably what contributed to its success was that the architects collaborated with the school of architecture’s own Bureau of Design Research (BDR) to improve the floor layouts, eliminating corridors, and opening spaces where possible.

But with the university focused on its ‘landmark’ new builds, most retrofit seems more light-touch. The 1959 Western Bank Library, having been conserved and upgraded by Avanti Architects in 2009, is being upgraded again as of August this year, its ventilation and cooling system the sole focus. The Geography and Planning Building to the north of Weston Park is also undergoing a light refurbishment.

Where Sheffield University seems to have struggled in setting out a legible architectural ambition for its campus, Hallam would appear to have a clearer vision, setting out its Campus Plan in 2018. The Future Spaces scheme, drawn up by BDP, which was appointed on to Hallam’s framework after an open tender, outlines a significant (but not groundbreaking) transformation of its estate with the aspiration to move to a single city centre campus over a 20-year timeline.

The first phase, expected to cost £220 million and to be delivered next year, includes new buildings for the university’s business school and social sciences. It also includes refurbishing the students’ union building, creating a major new green public space and other improvements to the existing estate. The university’s focus, again like Sheffield University’s, is to create consistent built quality across the whole so that the quality of the old is brought up to the standard of the new and the prospect of a ‘two-tiered’ estate is avoided.

This approach was initiated by Hallam’s 2015 refurbishment of the 1970s-style Arundel House into its Bryan Nicholson Building. Subsequent phases of the masterplan will see further refurbishment and redevelopment of other existing buildings alongside construction of new structures to make the campus a ‘gateway’ to the city.

BDP says Hallam’s campus plan has developed from liason with professional, academic and research stakeholders in order to make sure that the changing needs of the university are fully integrated into future architectural work.

Hallam’s procurement route also differs from that of its neighbour. In 2020, it announced the Hallam Alliance, an alternative construction industry procurement and delivery model formed from four partners: the university, BDP-Arup (as design consultancy), BAM Construction and CBRE (facilities management).

The profit-sharing model provides an opportunity to reform the way major projects are created and designed for the university – through collaboration and efficiency – and is described by its backers as ‘pioneering’.

Again, this system doesn’t go out to national architects in the same way as Liverpool University projects, for example, but its masterplan and its aims seem a lot more legible than its neighbouring institution.

Overall, it seems Sheffield University’s procurement process draws from a rather limited pool when it could benefit from the talent and expertise available both on its campus and nationally. The result is that it hasn’t and probably won’t imminently do better than its beloved Arts Tower. The campus is certainly solid and its public realm has been substantially upgraded but there is no real architectural refinement of the type O’Donnell + Tuomey has given the LSE and will soon bring to Liverpool.

Certainly, among most of the profession, when Sheffield is mentioned, all one thinks of architecturally, after Park Hill, is Sheffield Architecture School’s presence high up in the city looking down.