At long last, Issue 0 is up on the web reader

When you were small, did you ever get assigned to write a story about being trapped in a shopping centre overnight? After you finished the one about being shrunk to the size of a fingernail, or washed up on a desert island, it was all set to be your runaway bestseller.

In spidery Berol letters you set forth the horror of the urban shopping centre by sundown. ‘Nightmares In The Shopping Centre!!’ was the proposed title, and it was sure to reel in all the “Good Try” stickers from your teacher’s desk.

Back then, maybe, the English shopping centre was the stuff of nightmares. Good honest nightmares that didn’t pretend to be anything else. A windowless, airless hall of mirrored escalators, where fried food outlets encircled shoppers like vultures, discoloured tiles stuck fast to the surfaces on which they had long been laid, and an overhead hanging bulb or two tarred the whole scene with a nasty yellow light. Read more ⇒

There aren’t many spectator sports better than demolitions. They bring out emotions of retribution, joy, satisfaction and accomplishment. All you have to do is stay out of the way. Right now, a pretty spectacular one is going on in the city centre. The Fire Stations, who in honour of its impending destruction we eulogized in issue nine, is going down! I encourage you to pop down on your lunch break for a look. If you are lucky they will be ripping out a steel girder with a hydraulic clamp pincer thingy.

After some research, we have uncovered the demolition is being done by the Cuddy group. Apparently they are very good, currently holding the Demolition Company of the Year Award. (I love to think what the trophy looks like!) Other industry accolades include an award for Asbestos Supervisor of the Year and another for Industrial Demolition. Not just anyone can destroy a building it would seem. And these guys, are the best. The Manchester United of Demolition.

As discussed in our original article about the Firestation, destroying it is going to be a mission. Built to withstand nuclear blasts and the like, Cuddy have their work cut out for them. In the meantime, we can watch it ebb away, like a sand castle on the beach with waves lapping at its edges, a big red brick asbestos filled castle on the beach.

I’ve noticed a trend lately in British city centres. Alien architectural forms have been appearing amongst the dirty sandstone Victorian halls and glass and steel redevelopments that make up the 21st century urban centres.

When you’re arriving in Sheffield by train from the North, as you skirt the old steelworks and mills in the basin of Attercliffe, you get a view of the central skyline that has something very out of place about it. Amongst the familiar shapes of the Arts Tower swathed in plastic, the top of the Town Hall, the bright white rectangles of Hallam University, the brick red smudge of the Moorfoot Building and the grey spires of churches, the smooth circular crest of the ferris wheel on Fargate emerges clearly above the mass of the city. This bizarre shape came by itself, but recently the whole centre has periodically found itself filled with fun fair rides, appearing apparently out of nowhere and disappearing just as suddenly.

City centres have always used their public spaces as places for recreation and leisure, but before recently the garish and noisy excitement of the fun fair was never allowed to enter the heart of the city. This trend probably began with the London Eye, but since then almost every city centre in the country has hosted it’s own ‘eye’ for a while, and brought a host of other carnival rides with it, presumably to keep it company. Read more ⇒

Set Piece, by Daniel Von Sturmer is currently showing at Site Gallery, Sheffield until October 31. Based in Melbourne, this is his first solo show in the UK, having represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and working internationally.

The exhibition is an installation of a series of small video screens and projections arranged in a space designed by Von Sturmer himself. In the centre of the gallery, a large partition has been built, which narrows the space and creates strong perspectives towards either end. The works set in this space become inter-related as the viewer has to move between them - unexpected views between pieces occur as you move around the gallery.

Von Sturmer wants to investigate measurements, scales and the ubiquitous definitions of space that are around us. The backgrounds of some of his videos feature deformed grids and scales, in others small scale, hand made ‘modernist’ shapes are arranged into compositions. The measured, perspectival understanding of space is confronted by the flat picture plane. Article spoke to him at the opening of the exhibition. Read more ⇒

Sheffield’s concrete constructions are hard to avoid. Occupying whole areas of the city, these vast superstructures in rough cast stone are always apparent, but often underestimated. In order to show just what we mean, Article has curated a populist-list of Sheffield’s five best concrete mega-structures. A mega-stroika if you will. The only qualification for entry was that the concrete was cast on site. Read more ⇒

Echoes of Blackburn Meadows is an sound project based on the history of, and situated at the site of the former Blackburn Meadows power station, home to the Cooling Towers. The project will eventually place radio transmitters across the site, allowing visitors to tune into a historical industrial soundscape of the site’s past. It’s an incredible idea, and one which we hope will add much to ideas that surround the changing Sheffield by avoiding blank symbolism and properly locating memories to form a greater, more critical understanding of place.

We spoke to Jennifer Rich, one of the team behind the project.

How did the project begin, and who is involved?

The project began as a dissertation for my MA in Landscape and Culture at the University of Nottingham in 2006. I looked at Sheffield’s municipal electricity supply up until it was nationalised in 1948, focusing specifically on the machines and architectures of Blackburn Meadows power station. Recently, geographers have begun to collaborate with artists under the title of ‘Public Geography,’ aiming for innovative and engaging methods of exhibiting research findings. As much of my research was based on oral histories with former workers of the power station, it seemed appropriate to explore sound as a medium and I teamed up with two sound artists, Lewis Heriz and Tom Dixon. It was really the demolition of the cooling towers in 2008 that gave the project the boost it needed. We were now able to look at the landscape as a whole and situate the towers within the wider and more dynamic landscapes of a power station. We put in an R&D bid to the Arts Council and here we are about to launch Echoes of Blackburn Meadows (EBM) phase I.

Read more ⇒