In first year students headed out to the Peak District for their first design project proposing a small public building in a rural setting. In their HomeWorks design project students are introduced to a real client. This year these were a stonemason, a weaver, a composer, an architectural communicator, an artist and an arborist. Working on sites along the banks of the River Loxley in northern Sheffield, first year students explored and challenged notions of public and private space through the design of a house with an additional public function. Alongside this they also visited Glasgow and Edinburgh for their annual field trip and finished the year once again with a building project on the beach in Cleethorpes. In second year all design projects were located in Sheffield and there was a sustained emphasis on community and urban design. In their first project of the year students worked in pairs to design a temporary pavilion for London Road, before embarking on an eight-week project designing a library or theatre for the area and its local community organisations. Finally, in ‘A Place To Call Home’, second year students worked for South Yorkshire Housing Association to design a social housing project in a formerly industrial area of Sheffield. Split into five superstudios, the students’ projects worked with different clients and themes including live/work makerspace, polyvalency, age friendly living, multigenerational family living, and homelessness. Through guest presentations, building visits and detailed precedent analysis, the students’ projects respond to existing typologies as well as questioning current modes of dwelling. At the beginning of the year, third year students worked with international collaborators in Bergen, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Istanbul and Hiroshima to design place-specific market buildings. The resulting projects revealed how the trading of goods and resources is manifested in particular streets, neighbourhoods, cities and their wider connections across the globe. For their final design project of their undergraduate degree, third year students set their projects along the E20 trade route connecting Europe to the Americas, focusing on the cities of Hull, Manchester, and Liverpool. Each student engaged with an existing building developing a retrofit strategy. The relationship between new and old offered fertile ground for the exploring architecture informed by the past, whilst addressing the social and environmental imperatives of the contemporary world, and offering future visions for civic facilities. Here we show a selection of the varied work produced by our undergraduate students.

The MArch course is concerned with embedding a culture of personal investigation and critical enquiry within the student cohort, empowering them to develop distinctive work and to become positive agents for change in the world. At the heart of the course is our range of research-based design studios, providing a variety of approaches and allowing our students the freedom to explore their own interests whilst developing a set of specialist skills to take into practice. From the speculative and fantastical through to the deliverable and the live, all projects in some way respond to the challenges and complexities of the real. This year MArch studios have explored how the extraction and processing of building materials can aid our transition to net carbon zero whilst helping to restore the environment, architecture as a catalyst for change, reimagining the industrial building stock of Sheffield, social and ecological justice, decarbonisation among many other pressing topics. With projects set locally with the Peak District, Attercliffe and Sheffield City Centre, to further afield in the City of London, Cyprus and Sarajevo, our students are working to challenge existing engrained patriarchal structures and practices that underpin the architectural profession and to define a more equitable and sustainable future. Here we show a selection of the varied and exciting work produced by our MArch students.

The MA in Urban Design aims to address the complex challenges facing cities and neighbourhoods in the face of environmental, political, and social issues. The students on the MAUD course have this year looked at projects through the lens of ‘Ecologies of Care’. Their projects had seen them work with local community group SADACCA, grassroots community food organisations in Poplar, East London, and Sheffield-based community led agriculture group Regather. For their field study they visited Paris and Glasgow documenting relations between communities acting on the neighbourhood scale and urban regeneration processes taking place on larger scales of city making. This year was the 30th anniversary of MSc Sustainable Architecture Studies (SAS) and the students celebrated it through a design competition to encourage ideas towards the sustainability of the school. The year started with the SAS Sunday Roast bringing the students and SAS alumni together in a cosy welcoming event and then later in the year the students headed to the Netherlands for their field trip. This year students worked on a live retrofit project and there were four clients, including a Hindu community centre, the Baptist church and a residential building in the UK as well as an orphanage in India. This year students studying the MA in Architectural Design (MAAD) worked with the theme ‘Precarities’. Their studio projects speculated on a creative upgrade of existing buildings and spaces in Fargate, explored the intersection between notions of domesticity, and a concern with environmental issues on sites in Burngreave and the Wicker, considered sustainable urban regeneration in London and Singapore, and reimagined Sheffield’s infrastructure and overlooked spaces. Here we show a selection of the work produced by the students on our postgraduate masters courses and by our PhD students.

Sheffield School of Architecture is a social school and we are proud of our supportive and student-led culture. This year our student architecture society, SUAS, has held lectures and talks by a wide variety of interesting figures and practices including Jeremy Till, Jos Boys, IF_DO, Groupwork, Guy Holloway, and Witherford Watson Mann. Our students also work together to mentor each other and organise trips, social events and parties.