Today The Architects Journal magazine announced that doma architects have made it onto the shortlist for the RIBA Forgotten Spaces Sheffield Competition. This is very exciting news and we are thrilled to have been chosen!
Shortlisted entries are being exhibited in online galleries set up by both The Architect's Journal and The RIBA. They will also be displayed in an exhibition at The Crucible in Sheffield in September where the winners will be announced.
Open to entrants across the country, the competition invited architects, artists, engineers, planners and landscape designers to suggest designs and proposals for imaginative new uses for a ‘forgotten space’ within the city.
Food for Thought
The Old Mill Buildings, Millhouses Sheffield
Once the proud matriarch who looked after the people of the village that took her name, providing them with food and a place to work, the Millhouse now sits sad and unloved.
She looks out over a bustling park, from the lonely corner where she sits in a dignified silence, quietly accepting of the cricketers and dog walkers who now turn their backs, descendents of those who were so dependent on her just a short time ago.
She remains lost and forgotten, waiting patiently for the reinvigoration she sorely craves.
Without the corn mill, Millhouses would never have existed. Once a series of buildings that formed the centre of the community, providing people with food and a place to work, the millhouses have deteriorated into disrepair.
Our proposal reinterprets the original function of the corn mill and sees it reinvented as a predominantly self-sufficient community centre based around the production and provision of food.
At the heart of this, in the old courtyard, is a community garden with allotment style planting. This is enclosed by a growing garden wall, through which glimpses of internal activity can be observed by passers-by.
The garden provides vegetables and herbs for a kitchen where new cooking skills are taught, which in turn caters for functions in the community hall, and the public café that opens out into the park. A new shop sells produce from the garden and onsite bakery.
As well as providing a place to learn new skills in the kitchen and garden, an interactive learning wall is set up in the café to provide information on local history and current events.
The successful reinvigoration of the mill as a community facility acts as a catalyst for the regeneration of the village centre. The entrance to the community hall faces the old village centre, with new routes created between the village centre and the park, so that the mill no longer acts as the barrier it once was, but instead acts as a gateway between.
Sketches of main functions: Teaching kitchen; Cafe, information and exhibition space; Shop and bakery; Garden wall and kitchen garden
Aerial view of proposal in context
View of reinvigorated mill buildings from Millhouses Park
View of new kitchen garden located within mill house courtyard
A weary mill rediscovers her purpose. Once again she provides her people with food and a place to work, a place to meet and learn new skills.
The central character takes back her role.
