Friday – Matter Reality Exhibition!!

Well today is the big day, yes we said that about Tuesday, but today is the big big BIG day, that is the day of the Matter Reality exhibition. Our design, along with the designs of other teams using different materials, will be built on the Moor for the general public to see and use. By Midday everything will have to be assembled on site, along with an exhibition of the student’s work inside a bandstand in the centre of the Moor as organised by the project reporters. The British weather has been co-operative as always, complimenting the day with lashings of wind, rain and freezing cold.

Team Brick well on their way to assembly.

 

Naturally all groups were in the workshop on the Moor at ridiculously early hours (some as early as 6am!), doing last minute checks and assembling to make sure everything would be ready for the afternoon. Before we could start transporting the various components the concrete team still had to sort the problem of the broken squares and pieces:  we found that the desperately thrown together cement had held the Castles together well enough for them to be used in a game, even if they did look more like Medieval ruins than beautifully crafted designer chess pieces. Mike also popped to Wickes’ to secure some No More Nails to hold the red squares together. It wouldn’t stick them indefinitely, but it would allow them to be transported to the site where they could be held together by adjacent squares. We rejected the back-up Castles on the grounds that trying to paint them red wasn’t exactly the most elegant design solution. 

Telmo's alien nipples make for great stress relief.

 

To solve the problem of rough ground the team decided to lay the wooden boards that were used in the squares’ formwork on the ground, these would be covered by the concrete chessboard. The original plan was to lay the components of a bed of sand, but this would require several bags to brought, and our expenditure was already over £200! By late morning the components, pieces and squares both flawless and broken, were moved onto the site, the Concrete Space for Conversation was finally being assembled: 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile the project reports from each team headed off to the bandstand to put together the exhibition on Matter Reality. The goal of the exhibition was to show off to the public what the first Year’s at Sheffield School of Architecture had be doing for the past three weeks, with information on each ‘Space for Conversation’, the teams’ design processes, music, videos and free purple cakes! 

 

 

 

Moor cakes!

 

After helping set up the exhibition Nick returned to the site to see how the chessboard was setting up, this is what he found: 

 

 

 

 

 

After 3 weeks of making designs, arguing about designs, remaking designs, making concrete, smashing up concrete, illness, snow rain, lost valuables, 10 hour studio sessions, dust inhalation, shovelling induced backache, and hundreds of pounds of expenditure, our Concrete Space for Conversation was finally complete. Like some kind of giant Battenberg cake a red and white concrete chessboard now stood in the heart of the Moor, shoppers stopping to look through the English rain as they bustled between Debenhams at the top of the Moor and Atkinson’s at the bottom. Despite early reservations about the strength of the squares and the balance of the pieces, the board was fully functional with various students and even members of the general public joining in for games of chess! 

 

The board certainly worked as a generator for conversation, with chess players advising each other on moves and elderly couples stopping by to wonder to each other what was going on. All that was left now was to see what the tutors made of it: luckily for us they approved the cracked squares and ruined castles, commenting that it looked like the entire board had been sourced out of some kind of archaeological dig, score! Gathering at the bandstand in the early afternoon the entire First Year viewed the exhibition before visiting each Space for Conversation, 8 in all, in succession. It was incredible to see how each group had responded to both the brief and the properties of their respective materials, pushing them in quite extraordinarily innovative ways. 

Some of the other Spaces for Conversation: metal, brick, polymers and timber.

 

The Exhibition.

Battenberg Chessboard.

 

Castle Love.

 

By late afternoon it was time for the exhibition to come to end, the wind and rain conveniently ending with it. The final chess players were kicked off the chessboard so it could be disassembled and transported back to the studio. Each member of the team decided to take a piece (or three!) each as a souvenir, Telmo being shady enough to pinch the much coveted Queens whilst no-one else was around. This brings us to the end of the ‘Matter Reality’ project ‘, it had been a seriously intense three weeks, and we’re sure most of the public were not too keen on attending an architecture exhibition in the pouring rain, but it was clear that all teams were more than happy with what they had achieved. We feel the entire First Year seriously outdid themselves with this project, and would like to thank everyone who contributed and took interest. 

Thanks for reading! 

 

Team Concrete x 

Week 3 – Thursday and friday – If everything seems to be going well you have obviously overlooked something.

We cracked the white squares out of their moulds on Wednesday afternoon with 2 days to go until the exhibition. The grid was so sturdy we had to spend a good few hours carefully removing every screw and piece of wood. Like some kind of concrete block childbirth each square was slowly and uncomfortably pushed, pulled or slid out before being cautiously carried off to a room where each was laid out side by side. We decided to leave the pieces themselves for another night, just to make sure they were strong enough to withstand removal from the cocoon-like moulds.

We disassembled the grid formwork with care as we would soon have to put it together again to cast the red squares. We planned to use quick drying cement in order to get the finished components quickly together for Friday. Unfortunately we found that we had barely mixed the concrete before it had started to congeal into a big red lump on the shop floor. In a frenzy we dowsed the cement in water in attempt to keep it wet.  It was then thrown into the formwork, with the team managing to smooth it out before the surface dried completely.

Figuring out how to remove the white squares.

The firstborn.

Concrete maternity ward.

We're volcanic.

By late Thursday afternoon we were carefully removing the pieces from their formwork, this was the moment of truth, would our big design concept finally become concrete, or would it all literally crumble before our eyes? 

Health and safety is paramount. Always.

The pawns were a success, the plastic bottles had not just given them a beautiful organic shape, but the concrete had transferred the surface of them onto itself, giving an almost varnish like shine. Next came the Kings, Queens, Knights and Bishops, some pieces had bits of plastic stuck into them or didn’t quite stand straight, but this was nothing sanding the still quite delicate concrete couldn’t fix.

The white pawns.

The Queen, at once beautiful and terrifying.

Red and White.

All that was left was the Rooks and the red squares…

…and that’s when the disaster stuck.

All of the castles collapsed, the team struggled to remove the wooden moulding that was used to create the cavities in the shape, pulling the details of the piece apart. Although the castles still stood, their intricate shapes were all but destroyed. But the worst was still to come, when we started to remove the red squares from the grid, cracks started to appear left right and centre. At first we thought they were just being pulled out too roughly, then it became clear what had happened: we had used an unsuitable mix of sand and aggregate for the quick drying cement. More important still by throwing so much water on the mix the day before, we had significantly weakened the cement’s ability to bind. The squares did not just break into two or three pieces; they seemed to be crumbling to dust.

There was no time to cast more pieces, the exhibition was in less than 24 hours and no-one fancied paying £15 for another tin of red cement dye. Some members of the group tried to fix the castles back together with freshly mixed cement whilst others tried to cast backups out of the scarce material we had left (a couple of plastic cola bottles and no red dye). Meanwhile we intensely debated the fate of the fragmented red squares, should they be glued back together somehow, fitted together in fragments or thrown out completely? At first it looked like the latter, some of the red squares were in such little fragments they were beyond repair.  However, several members of the team defiantly started to assemble them back together. They then lined them up alongside the white squares, creating a mock up of the chessboard inside the workshop:

Clare demonstrates the compressive strength of concrete.

Although the squares were incredibly cracked, it was found that by lining them up as a chessboard the fragments were pushed back together in place and became stable enough to hold the weight of someone standing on them. Better still, many members of the team felt the deep cracks actually gave the board a weathered, antiquated feel. We would argue that the point of the breakage was to make the board look like it had been there for a long time, talk about turning a design disaster around!

The back-up Castles, immortalised fizzy pop.

However there were still several problems, the board only stayed stable in the workshop as the floor underneath was completely flat, on our site the squares would be subjected to uneven sloping ground, as well as roughness of the Moor’s native concrete. The dilemma of what to do with the ruined Castles also remained: should we use the cemented together originals anyway, or use the hacked together backups? Either way we would have to wait till morning for the cement to harden and the group left the workshop when it was gone 8pm, some feeling it would all be alright on the night, some looking slightly ill:

The Moor, oldskool.

Stella found these pictures of The Moor throughout over a century of history. It is interesting to see how the imposing concrete shopfronts of today replaced the more sparser brick buildings before the War, as well as what the road looked like before pedestrianisation.

1880 - South Street at junction with Earl Street, right. Premises include Pawnbroker John Eaton, Grocer Francis Redshaw and Pump Tavern. St Paul's Church is in the background

1940 - West Side of the Moor from Moorhead, showing air raid damage

1940 - The Moor looking towards Moorhead and Pinstone Street. Button Lane is on the left

1940 Mark's and Spencers Ltd after an air raid.

1950 - The Moor looking towards junction with Prince Street. A Ttemporary window display belonging to John Atkinson is on the right.

1960 - Elevated view of The Moor.

1990 - The Moorfoot Market looking towards the Manpower Services Commision Building. Including Our Price, Argos and catalogue showroom

Tuesday 23rd February – How many builders does it take to mix concrete?

Today’s the big day! With the formwork all down at the workshop by the afternoon, we were ready to begin casting the concrete. We started with the white squares that would form half of the board: casting the Snowcrete and aggregate into a timber grid. Knowing recycling is best, Telmo and Rick obtained the timber from the Arts Tower’s refurbishment project.

Speaking of the Arts Tower, it has started to become unwrapped, very exciting indeed.

 There’s an old joke in the construction industry: how many builders does it take to dig a hole? Three, one to do the digging and the other two to watch. At first this adage seemed true, with Rick and Mike doing all the dirty work while the rest of the team formed a kind of audience around them (the reporters obsessively taking photos throughout). However, once the mixing was done the entire team got stuck in with the casting; smoothing the surfaces with trowels and acting as human vibration machines.

Things went unusually smoothly at first; the white concrete went into moulds without much trouble. However, when it came to casting the red pieces, we seemed to overestimate the fluidity of the wet substance, the entire group having to force the stubborn red sludge down into the moulds. Worse still, some moulds began to come apart and had to be rescued with reams of duct tape. From Clare’s reaction to the situation it was clear some heads would be rolling!  We finished the day with very dry hands and little red souvenirs all over our clothing, there were still red squares and a few pieces to cast but for now all we could do was wait for our current creations to harden.

Rayte manly work.

Square formwork.

Hello project manager.

Even a Pawn can become a Queen.

Is it in yet?

 

Week3 – Monday 22nd February

Today the team began to move down from the studio to the ‘workshop’, a disused shop unit on the Moor itself situated under some very inviting looking government offices. This gave us a chance to absorb ourselves into the context of the design and begin assembling on site for the big exhibition, now only 4 days away! Between the Moor and the studio various members of the team were busy putting finishing touches to the mould whilst Rick was busy sourcing ingredients for the concrete. By tomorrow, we will be bringing our chess pieces to life.

Government fortress.

Pawn moulds waiting to get their fill, spot the imposter.

Awwwwwwwwww, c'mon guys, look at the camera!

Conversation related public art!

Week 2 – Tweaking the Design

Now that we had our solid design concept, we would have to spend a few days figuring out exactly how the design could be refined to make it completely buildable. We had to carefully plan the dimensions of the components, as well as the recipe for the concrete mix. We also had to fully design the formwork that would be used to mould the pieces. As we needed to leave at least a couple of days for the concrete to cure properly between casting and assembling the board on site, a stringent work timetable was drawn up to make sure everything was done on time. The groups had to brave bad weather and several bouts of illness (which may or may not have been induced by trips to Corporation nightclub) to make sure everything would be ready for the big day.

Stella and Purandhi secured a great site to place the board on the Moor, it included an enclosure for the chess games, as well as concrete seating and approaches from several directions. Back in the studio we were working hard to develop A3’s initial designs for each of the chess pieces, it was decided that drinks bottles would be the basis of the formwork for the pieces, something first year students would have in abundance. We designed the pieces to allow the moulds to be easily assembled by the start of the third week whilst still showing off many of the traditional features of each chess piece, striking a marriage between traditional chessboard design and our own ideas. All going to plan we should be casting by Tuesday the 23^rd. For the recipe of the concrete we went ahead with the idea of one team of pieces being white, the other red. Many a bank account among the group felt the strain of buying white cement!

Prototype red piece.

Formwork for the Knight and the Rook.

The Queen with her latex crown.

Model of a knight.

 

In addition to preparing their own projects, the reporters from each group were banded together at the end of the week to create an entire exhibition for the whole years work. This will be centred in a bandstand right in the heart of the Moor, containing stands of what each team has done, their design processes and even homemade cakes. Local radio stations were contactied and we’re even hoping to get some local chess clubs down. Of all the things we imagined ourselves doing, PR men was one of the more surprising revelations.

Nick got chucked out for trespassing, shouldn't have left the door unlocked tbh.

We can has polls.

Tuesday 16th February – Design Competition!

The Design Competition opened on Tuesday morning with each group given about 5 hours to create a detailed scheme to present it to the entire year. For each assigned material 2 groups were pitted against each other and Groups A3 and F2 had to both come up with a separate Space for Conversation each. At the end of the day only one winner would be chosen. Both groups soon set about creating not just a full design, but a presentation that would be able to succinctly convince the rest of the year to choose their idea, the competition was on!

F2 had been throwing around several different concepts around for at least a week; they began with the general idea of creating some kind of interactive structure that would stimulate conversation between different groups of people through discovery, interaction and teamwork. Inspired by the Burr puzzle the group devised the idea of creating several blocks that could be linked together to create several shapes or sculptures. A different idea was proposed of creating some kind of hangman game, which involved casting 3d letters into concrete and allowing the users to fill in the gaps. This in turn generated the idea of creating ‘giant concrete letter blocks’ which read different words from different directions, Nick and Clare took the idea in a different direction still and suggested each angle showed not a different word but a different language.

It soon became clear that the design would be strongest if it showed off fully the formal versatility of concrete. F2’s big design concept soon came of wanting to make concrete fun and playful, we had discovered the surprising and counter-intuitive possibilities of the material in our experiments and wanted to incorporate the crazy ideas such as using fabric and coloured paint when mixing it. The group decided to stick with the idea of casting 3d letters, but this time with the twist that each letter would show off a different concrete recipe, texture and possibly colour. This idea was unanimously approved by the group members as it managed to reconcile so many separate design concepts: the casting of 3d letters, the association to conversation through language and word and creation of playful, unusual forms and textures with the material.

The group imagined the public really getting their hands on the concrete forms, surprised at what could be done with a material that is often stereotyped as being cold, grey and faceless, this brought in the ideas of conversation through physical interaction and the idea of the public experiencing discovery through the space. All that was left was to decide what the letters should spell out: in a light bulb over the head moment Maeve came out with the single word ‘Jungle’. It was a post-modern commentary on how many of us felt about the Moor, a big Concrete Jungle in which we would build our own little concrete jungle.

Computer generated isometric of the 'Language Block' idea, the word 'talk' is used as an example.

Just mere metres away, A3 were busy pulling together their own design idea. The first thing to be suggested was to create some kind of ‘concrete tree, an unusual object that would provide in space to gather under and talk and show off the sculptural capabilities or concrete. Other ideas suggested included a series of sculptures inspired by the Liverpool Superlambananas, which could be also used as seating and something which played on the fact that ‘Moor’ spells ‘room’ backward.

A3’s big idea also came on the morning of the design competition when Telmo suggested the idea of some kind of large scale ‘game’. It is interesting that although both groups where working separately at this point, they both arrived at the idea of something interactive and playful, this probably grew out of the fact that we could cast unique components out of the concrete and move them with relative ease. The precedent this time was a game from a school playground and the group played with the natural choice of noughts and crosses, with a concrete grid and pieces. The idea soon diverged to a giant board game and after a bit of thought, the group settled on creating a 2x2m concrete chess set, which they would submit for the competition.

Noughts and crosses straight out the sketchbook, complete with cryptic annotatations.

By the afternoon both groups were well on the way to creating media that would show off each design in any way possible: scale models, full size mock-ups and Shiv’s hallmark Photoshop wizardry. By about 3:30 all groups in the year displayed their work in a mini-exhibition around the studio, it was wonderful to see all the ideas everyone had come up with in such a relatively short space of time. There was no time to put off the judging though, and at the end of the day only half of the designs put up could survive into the next stage. The groups were frogmarched into a lecture theatre where each was given no more than two minutes to explain each design to their peers. The success of each scheme was judged by John-Paul Walker’s extremely scientific and precise measuring tool: The Clapometer.

Hard at work.

F2's scale model.

Scaled concrete letter, the texture was created by casting in plastic bags.

Mock-up of A3's chess pieces and board, once again cast in plaster!

Some of the other materials in the Matter Reality Project: stone, brick and timber. We would have to battle it out for each respective group's approval.

JP brings out the Clapometer.

A3 show the audience what they're made of.

In a scenario of luck (or absolute terror) the concrete groups were called up first: A3 followed by F2. A3 presented their giant chess board with a mock up of two pieces and 4 squares while F2 drove home their desire to make the Concrete Jungle fun with a scale model and textural samples. Both groups were met by rapturous applause, whistling and table-pounding, but in the end the Clapometer sounded a clear winner: A3’s chessboard would be coming to life in the heart of Sheffield. Following other material groups’ presentations, ornamented with stone-cold puns and dubiously sourced wooden poles, F2 conceded defeat and were assimilated into one big group. We were all now faced with the task of figuring out how to cast 32 chess pieces out of homemade concrete, it’s going to be a messy week.

Week One – Trent Concrete, material design and experimentation.

We received the brief for the project on Tuesday 2^nd of February, along with a talk from Sandra Barley of the Moor. It was explained that whatever we created must be built entirely out of concrete and in order to maximise the quality of the design we had to be fully aware of the material, its structural properties and the design opportunities it offered. To do this we paid a visit to Trent Concrete in Nottingham, where we learnt much about the manufacture of concrete and its use in building construction:

Trent deal in creating pre-cast ‘aesthetic concrete’ in a huge range of finishes, some of which 'pretend' to be other materials such as brick or stone,

On the factory floor wet concrete is cast into timber moulds and left to set, the entire process is carefully controlled to give each panel exact aesthetic and structural properties.

The visit gave us an insight into not just the manufacture of concrete, but the nature of the construction industry, complete with misogynist workers, overbearing architects and shrewd contractual clauses.

The striking patterns on this cladding show the unique textural capabilities of concrete.

One of the defining properties of concrete is that it is a naturally shapeless, textureless material. The combination of ingredients (cement, aggregates and admixtures) and technique that is used to cast it have a huge effect on the form of the final product; it can be moulded into practically any texture and shape at the designer’s whim. This offered the groups great flexibility in what we could create as a design, but it also added a whole new element to our workload: we didn’t just have to design the structure; we had to design the concrete too!   

Both groups spent this week testing the possibilities and limitations of the concrete. Creating our own little concrete factory in the corner of the studio we explored using all kinds of aggregates, recipes and moulds, some usual, some not so usual. We wanted to see how far we could push the material, filling it with polystyrene until it fell apart, dying it wonderful blues and reds and casting it into plastic, cardboard and glass. A3 managed to acquire some vermiculite, which massively reduced weight and created moulds out of foam, allowing for some quite captivating shapes. F2 pushed many bizarre ingredients into the mix: washing-up liquid, beads, tin foil and even plastic toys! Crushed glass aggregate was thrown out on the grounds of being health and safety suicide, much to Nick’s protestations. 

F2's first attempt at making concrete in a cardboard and plastic mould, the aggregate is pea-shingle with red dye.

Our first creations, so cute you want to stroke them.

Polystyrene aggregate

Some of F2s experiments, cloth and nail surfaces, polystyrene and blue paint and so much polystyrene the whole thing fell apart.

Some of A3's experiments, the intricate shape on the right was plaster cast into a plastic and foam mould.

All the time our design ideas were slowly gestating, we began to think about what conversation was and how a piece of architecture could elicit conversation. One key problem that faced us in designing both material and structure was whether should create a highly refined design of concrete then base the design of the space on this, or try and adapt the material to our wayward design concepts. Naturally we flipped between the two and by the end of the week had many disparate and fanciful ideas of what the final creation would look like, more on those in the next instalment!