Harmony Works

Year: 2017

Client: Sheffield Music Academy & Sheffield Music Hub

Harmony Works Live Project brings together two flourishing Sheffield music organisations; Sheffield Music Hub and Sheffield Music Academy, to propose an exciting new centre for music education and performance in Canada House, an empty landmark historic building in Castlegate. This centre will provide access to opportunities in music education and performance for young people from all backgrounds in the South Yorkshire region.

We began with the idea of ‘music factory’, rooting the hub in the fabric of Sheffield through adaptive insertions and creative demolition to transcend the ‘Steel City’ identity to form a new identity of ‘Music City’. The tram network was re-imagined as a travelling music venue, entertaining passengers, raising awarenes through a ‘Tram Jam’, using performance to gather public feedback. Harmony Works would be a node at the centre of Sheffield’s musical (transport) network.

The students created a design vision working with the following themes:

Activate: announcing Harmony Works as a destination
Occupy: creating insertions into the built fabric to enable education and performance to function
Connect: developing the cultural and social life of the city through accessibility to music.

These themes were all imagined through the question ‘What If..?’ to illuminate the rich opportunities within Canada House. We collaborated with teachers, students, the public and our clients from the Music Hub and Music Academy to a vision for the future of Harmony Works.

This Live Project was instrumental in kickstarting a substantial capital project for Sheffield and the Region - see our Impact page for more details

Mentor: Russell Light

Students: Shushu Cai, Matthew Chamberlain, Xiao Chen, Abderrahman Ech-chikh, Jack Flynn, Mingming Han, Ifgenia Ioannou, Will Kreibich, Jingyi Liu, Tuyang Liu, Tobias Mackrill, Tom Moore, Jialin Pan, Stephani Porfyriou, Ashley Mayes, Emma Warbrick, Tiantian Xie

Continuing work through Live Works and Live Projects

Since the Live Project, Live Works has continued to work collaboratively with Harmony Works, submitting a pre-planning proposal to facilitate the purchase of the building and producing physical and digital material to attract funding for the project.

In 2021, Harmony Works purchased the building and continue to work with Live Works to both generate further funding for the realisation of the Harmony Works vision and to develop a program to engage the young people and the wider public in the participatory design of the building itself and the wider area of Castlegate.

We worked with the client group for another Live Project in 2023 called Harmony Works +

https://liveprojects.ssoa.info/2017/harmony-works/

View the animation from the original Live Project below:

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