Type
culture

Source
open anonymous competition

Client
Sheffield Media Centre Ltd

Address/Site
Sheaf Square, Sheffield, England

Site area
420 m2

Building area
420 m2

Total floor area
3.036 m2

Storeys
groundfloor + 4

Program
festival centre (foyer, auditorium, mediatheque, shop) + managed workspaces

Structure
concrete frame structure, concrete slabs

Cladding
printed glass paravans on steel sub-structure

Architect
SADAR+VUGA (Jurij Sadar, Boštjan Vuga, Tina Hočevar, Tomaž Krištof, David Vernet, Špela Štern)
THE DESIGNERS REPUBLIC (Ian Anderson, Nick Bax, Nathan Dytor)
ATELIER ONE (Aran Chadwick)
SAVANT_Q.S. (Bruce Haswell)

Our proposal for the Sheffield film festival centre is based on a mixing of production/communication/presentation between festival (public) and nonfestival (internal) part of the existing office with cinema halls on the ground floor with direct access from the new extension. We propose a meeting room on the mediatheque level which can be used by offices or by festival people, for instance. The project actually tends towards hybridisation. The new part acts as an extension of the existing one. Upper offices, the new ones, can be rented to i.e. film production companies which then use fetival/showroom facitilies.
Festival days then become only a peak of congestion of people in that space. There is no an extreme difference between these and normal days, except of the quantity of people.

Two thin folded screens (paravans) define the exterior, folding along the slabs, reacting with life inside and the surrounding urban fabric: water features, medieval walls, sixties housing & a luxury hotel.
The paravans filtrate the sfc activites, moods & atmospheres into the city and vice versa, operating as a mood facade, where moods of the city will correspond with moods of the SFC.