Circus City

“When I was a child, the first time I saw the circus arrive, it was like an apparition in the night. Like a giant balloon that had landed without warning -
there it was in front of my house in the morning, as if it had appeared from nowhere…”

Federico Fellini (Fellini: A Director’s Notebook)

Sheffield provides the local stage on which Circus City manifests itself in built form, but its metaphorical threads reach out towards the real and not
so real cinematic cities of Berlin and Warsaw.

The Circus City therefore, is not one complete city, but a constantly moving and fleeting fragment of the city on the move. Acting as an agent for
change, it provides a dynamic system for the production of new urban and cultural space that will seem to disintegrate and connect at the same
time, cultures of the local and global, real and not so real in an instant. The reciprocal relationship between Circus and everyday life becomes
a state where society can negotiate its own future.

Located primarily in evacuated fields found in the three cities the Circus City makes do with what it finds, enveloping and adapting found structures,
resources and technologies to infiltrate, innovate and construct space for community, as well as community itself, in unusual and provisional ways.

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About

Studio Six, MArch School of Architecture,

University of Sheffield

The work of  Studio Six is linked to the Interdependence Day project, (www.interdependenceday.co.uk)

launched in 2006 to reinvigorate sustainability debates and to question some of the technocratic outcomes of seeing ecological and economic concerns as an accounting or ‘problem solving’ challenge.

What can architecture contribute to this attempt to reconsider global, economic and environmental issues?

Interdependent understanding invites an architecture rooted in creativity and metaphor, which ‘listens’ to the potential of a city rather than imposing mark marketable criteria of enterprise, lifestyle or efficiency. This architecture is based on conversations between the city and its varied inhabitants, and in an awareness of its social, economic and ecological metabolism.

The interdependencies of a place may be understood as a particularly dynamic and complex constellation of social, economic and emotional relations, but the term also has ambitions for a sense of a place that is extroverted and unexpected. Interdependence includes a consciousness of links with the wider world integrating in a positive way the near and far, the local and the global, the human and the ecological.

The studio will instigate alternative modes of architectural collaboration, representation, and communication that are more open and amateur rather than specialised or expert. We will be exploring an architecture of ‘making-do’ and of ‘provisional construction’.

The studio has been exploring the ’steel cities’ of Nowa Huta and Sheffield but we have also been thinking about other cities, about state responsibility, about carnival, about pigeons…     Renata Tyszczuk