The project explores the potentials of engaging with the complex and multiple cultural conditions of urban sites and consequently how the rigidity and singular nature of these impermeable thick edge spaces can be opened to diverse flows relating to multiple contexts.

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Through processes of design intervention, the project proposes a ‘polycontextual’ approach to introduce flows of wider contextual dimensions within an urban site – promoting architectural solutions that blur, fray and punctuate thick edges by developing them as threshold conditions between adjacencies.

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Castlegate in Sheffield as a destination is envisioned as a constantly shifting cultural landscape. Simultaneously functioning as a flood basin, the proposed landscape and structures are designed as catalysts for volatile cultural festivities.

 

The proposed cable car station and the observatory tower enables the constant stream of visitors to arrive at the events and festivals on site despite the occurrences of flood. Improvisational and interactive architecture built of the scaffolds will adapt to varying programmes of each festival- introducing an architecture of constant activity within the landscape of Castlegate.

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​In essence, Envisioning Castlegate proposes a multifunctional events facility and landscape that permanently supports local arts and culture festivals, and the structuration of a dynamic, relational and non-deterministic public space. The continuous process of construction, disassembly and reassembly serve to sustain and fuel the theatricality and speculative element of what the site could be in the future. 

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From this, the liminal quality of the site is offset through temporal carnivalesque that will occupy the space for as long as it remains empty as a flood basin.