‘Brutalist Speculations and Flights of Fancy’ on Friday 9 September (11am – 7.30pm) is an exploration of Sheffield’s six best Brutalist buildings (Park Hill, Castle Markets, the Electricity Substation on Moore Street, The Holy Cross Church on Spotswood Mount, Norton Water Tower and Psalter Lane Art School.
The event at the Site Gallery will open with guided walks to some of the buildings, followed by a series of presentations, a book launch and reception that will explore proposals and enquiries, speculations, and flights of fancy based around the position that these Brutalist buildings hold in Sheffield today.
Norton Water Tower
In his book ‘A Guide to The New Ruins of Modernism’ architectural commentator and Guardian journalist, Owen Hatherley, says that Sheffield ‘just doesn’t seem to know how good it is’ and that its modernist architectural heritage is ‘what makes Sheffield different from Leeds, or Manchester, or Birmingham’.
Twenty artists and writers from Sheffield and Berlin have been invited to contribute, to consider the position that these buildings hold now and to speculate on their possible futures. These extraordinary buildings are sometimes forgotten, often reviled, loved, misunderstood, and contested, but form a vital part of Sheffield’s architectural heritage.
Owen Hatherley (Guardian journalist, Author of ‘A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain’ & ‘ Uncommon” a book on Pulp)
Steve Pile (Professor of Human Geography, the Open University and author of ‘Real Cities: modernity, space and the phantasmagorias of city life’)
Professor Jane Rendell (Director of Architectural Research at the Bartlett, UCL, architectural designer and historian, art critic and writer)
Tickets for the event are £20 or £10 for concessions.
