Sheffield - A love letter to the architecture school

Nick Brindlet's final year prolect for a reworking of central Sheffield as an urban park (1998-9)

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In honour of its 100th birthday (and Valentine's Day), University of Sheffield alumna Kaye Alexander introduces Peter Blundell Jones' history of the School of Architecture

University of Sheffield School of Architecture 1908-2008: A Centenary History. By Peter Blundell Jones. University of Sheffield/BDR Publications

This book charting Sheffield School of Architecture's 100-year existence is not remarkable for what it celebrates (Sheffield is certainly not the first school to reach this ripe old age), but for its anecdotal history.
Written by school head Peter Blundell Jones, in many ways the story of Sheffield is that of most UK schools, and thus its appeal is not in the general, but in the specific. The careful rediscovery and dusting off of student work, and the biographies of key personalities are telling illustrations of a school which holds its past charges and staff in such reverence.
The following extract, from a section headed 'Student experience of the late 1960s', charts a period when the school began taking the final steps towards becoming the institution recognisable today – including its colonisation of the Arts Tower's upper floors, its standardised course structure and its ethos of pragmatism. See bellow for the excerpt.

The creation of Sheffield's Faculty of Architecture and the break away from dependency on Arts prompted the creation of a new set of courses starting in 1965, which Andrew Beard, a student in 1965-1970, called a 'seismic change'. An experimental first-year course on Bauhaus lines was devised, followed by new second and third-year courses culminating in a BA. The compulsory yearout came next, followed by two years to Diploma, the pattern that has remained in place until today.
According to Beard, head of school Professor Needham was not much in evidence during these changes – the prime mover in the renovation being first-year master J Marshall Jenkins, aided by a recently appointed cohort of young lecturers including John Tarn, Geoffrey Broadbent and John
Wilson. There was an emphasis on contemporary arts, and Beard remembers Broadbent bringing in his hi-fi equipment to expose them to John Cage's music. This group of staff also introduced the second/third-year 'special study' under which each student chose a topic in one of four sub-disciplines of townplanning, interior design, building science or history.
John Allan [now director of Avanti Architects], who arrived as a law graduate from Edinburgh in 1966, developed a distinguished career out of his 'special study'. As the first student ever to pursue the history option, he embarked with John Tarn's guidance on a project about the English Modern movement, resulting in a document 70mm or so thick. Allan studied the buildings of leading figures from the 1930s and interviewed them. Maxwell Fry asked to read it and promptly recommended a publication contract, but the task proved too broad. Instead, Allan turned his attention to the most sophisticated of British Modernists, Berthold Lubetkin, and took his time – while also in daily practice – to explore every nook and cranny of the Lubetkin oeuvre and to discuss it with its author. The result was the definitive 600-page Lubetkin monograph, a work far more technically informed than most art histories.
With this expertise, Allan soon found himself engaged in conservation projects for Lubetkin buildings, and started the restoration wing of Avanti. Looking back, he describes the school in his time as 'very grounded': 'What was special about Sheffield was that you were set real problems for which real answers were expected… places like the AA were very clever but did not have a handhold in reality.'
Allan retained all his student work and has generously allowed us to reproduce samples of it. The first impression given by his portfolio is of much drawing for many purposes, and immediately to quite a high standard. The students were taught to think always with a pencil in hand. There were surveys of tools, of street furniture and of modern chairs, each requiring shaded perspective drawings in ink along with a handwritten critique. This was in addition to the many standard types of drawing normally involved in architectural production: plans, sections, elevations, details, perspectives, mostly carried out in ink on tracing paper with anonymous stencilled lettering.
A Functionalist ethos is reflected in some ergonomic studies of lecture-hall chairs, a graph of anthropometrics, and in the commentaries of some subsidiary studies, such as a beautifully drawn claw hammer (pictured far right) accompanied by the comment: 'Hammer: the obvious shape for an implement of function. Nail extractor very effective. Cast iron. Economical in design and manufacture. Aesthetically colourless.'
Looking across the portfolio, none of Allan's BA projects seem to have had much real social content, but Allan himself went on to address the social gap by producing at a diploma level a huge thesis project exploring the unfashionable topic of housing, and his practice, Avanti, has for 25 years been a
pioneer of socially sensitive building.
A final glimpse of the school from John Allan's perspective is his memory of SUAS, the Sheffield University Architectural Society run by students, which seems to have started in the 1940s and was in full swing by his time. As one of its committee, he personally invited several notable speakers, including Maxwell Fry, Jack Pritchard, Isi Metzstein and Andy Macmillan, Owen Luder, Richard Rogers, David Wild, John Weeks, and Trevor Dannatt. He also invited future head of school David Gosling, then at work on Irvine New Town.

Resume: Blundell Jones sings Sheffield's praises in this book-long chorus of 'happy birthday to you…'