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 included a weaver, whiskey distillers, illustrators, and a swift conservationist. They also visited Newcastle for their annual field trip and finished the year once again with a building project on the beach in Cleethorpes. In second year design projects were based in Chesterfield and Sheffield. For their first two design projects students focused on community and civic buildings, before designing a social housing project for South Yorkshire Housing Association in their final project of second year. Split into super studios, the projects addressed homelessness and temporary living, age-friendly living, and multi-generational living. This year, year three has been framed around the theme of Leisure Society. At the beginning of the year, third year students worked with international collaborators in Bergen, Buenos Aires, Istanbul and Hiroshima to design place-specific buildings for bathing. For their final design project of their undergraduate degree, third year students set their projects in Barnsley, Doncaster and Wakefield, where they engaged with an existing building to explore thematic issues, questioning how communities can engage in creative and productive leisure activities. 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. Our world renowned Live Projects programme provides a fantastic introduction to the course, and the chance for students to build their skills, confidence and communication skills working within a proto practice for a live client. 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. We encourage our students to ask questions of the discipline that would define them, to go beyond normative modes of practice and challenge the existing engrained patriarchal structures and practices that underpin the architectural profession.

The MA in Urban Design (MAUD) questions the conventional process of designing cities, suggesting that real participation and collective collaboration with communities should be prioritised. Through working with local community organisations, MAUD’s Just Energy and Just Nature studios explore how architecture and urbanism can take responsibility, and actively engage with ‘Just Transitions’ across the localities they are rooted in. This year the MA in Architectural Design (MAAD) centred around the theme of ‘Precarities’. Projects addressed various interrelated aspects of multi-scalar processes that can be seen as producing or effecting states of precarity: from the health of individual human bodies, the vulnerabilities of migration, the effects of (post)colonial and (post)socialist legacies, the fragility of technologies and infrastructures — including material, digital, and immaterial infrastructures of care — to the planetary-scale of ecological and environmental crises. The MSc in Sustainable Architecture Studies (SAS) is based around the theme of ‘Retrofit’. The studio projects have built on the work of previous MArch live projects at Canada House, Abbey Field House and Worksop Priory and have considered how you enable existing buildings to be financially sustainable to run, provide thermal comfort to their users, and reduce building derogation all within the challenging framework of a historical listing for a community organisation. Here we show a selection of the work produced by the students on our postgraduate masters courses.

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.