Allies and Morrison

Charles Street Multi Storey Car Park . Sheffield

photos: Allies and Morrison

This multi-storey car park provides public car parking in Sheffield city centre and forms part of the regeneration of the Heart of The City project. It provides 520 parking spaces over ten floors above retail space. The structure consists of precast concrete columns, walls and floors. The external envelope is finished in natural anodised aluminium panels, painted green on the inside. Each is manufactured from a single sheet of folded aluminium, cut to an angle on two sides, and hung in four different orientations. This provides natural ventilation and hides the structure behind a homogeneous surface.

The appearance of the panel system varies between day and night. By day, a varied monochromatic pattern of light and dark is achieved over each of the elevations, with each panel giving a different light reflectance from its surface. The variety of open ends and tilted faces transform the surface as daylight fades. By night, the interior lighting bleeds between each panel and creates a non-uniform composition of light and dark across the surface. This is undefined either by vertical structure or by the floor slabs, and becomes a patterned surface without a governing scaling device from the structure.