Slices. Iʼm hoofing the ground, raising dust. The idea of given sight-lines, fresh incisions into the Upperthorpe area, has me eager to get on with my responses to some of the sights around here. We are given route partners and are instructed to come up with sensual or affective responses to prescribed views around CADS.

I am not worried about the quality of my responses. Iʼve been waiting a while to do this. I know that the path from sense to pen is a war zone but today, I feel bullet-proof.

Myself and my walking partner do not agree on many of the vistas. Each time I position myself to take a view, I feel an electrical hum that must be my background prejudice. Inside my head, coils of ethics and self doubt get too hot, too quick and they threaten to melt through any aesthetics. If the response is finally satisfactory? A pulse of Neon. A wrong response however, wonʼt budge and sticks with me until I am forced to scratch unwanted words into the paper, my partner at my shoulder. Flustered, I discover a crazed compulsion to personify. Buildings turn out to be aloof or ashamed or bullied. Moralizing is also an issue.

One of our first stimuli is a factory facade whose features are high windows (some blinded with windolene), a fat palm-width bell at eye-level and a rusted door with stainless steel studs. These triangulate into “capricious” for me and “confused” for my partner.

Ruskin Oxford Lectures on Landscape (1871)

The interest of a landscape consists wholly in its relation either to figures present—or to figures past—or to human powers conceived.

In relation to humans

There is no more sublimity—per se—in ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, than in ground level; nor in a perpendicular fracture of a rock, than in a horizontal one. The only thing that makes the one more interesting to you in a landscape than the other, is that you could tumble over the perpendicular fracture and couldn't tumble over the other.

Upperthorpe offers us so much to trip over. Feelings of uncertainty and disgust run up against sublime novelty in the steep streets that abut CADS in Smithfield.

A workshop in Urban Ekphrasis in Upperthorpe (12th May 2012) organized by SKINN and CADS

Rachel Genn

From CADS to Cupola and back

Round on to West Bar Green, the spotlights above the entrance to the dead police station seem as if they are from a fifties dance hall and I feel a fraudulent nostalgia for a time I have never encountered.

Past the fire engine museum (lazy and sad for different reasons), our route map directs us to look at a storage hangar that blares yellow across the road from the neo-classical law courts. I turn away from it and its armadillo logo because I am embarrassed by it (Foolish I scrape onto my bit of the sheet).

My mistake was to expect that each response would feel right in the same way. The processing of the

information at a viewpoint, the jostling, the violent grabbing of the scene by our individual experience, has shaken me up. This is too intimate a task to share with a stranger. Responding like this engages so many private networks that need to activate on their own terms and then on each othersʼ. At every level, tussles at synapse speed push forward winners of conflicts of interest that might fire the response that you feel is worthy of the task, and of you, and of the view. Count the layers.

We veer left, away from Corporation Street and slow down as we pass a factory-wall-length mural: a turqouise and taupe corner of Eden. Behind it we discover the animal shelter hunkering, barely able to breathe or bark and kept well down with barbed wire. A Dulux warehouse, lounging parallel to the mural, brags silently that it is responsible for the colours of the space- birds and the aliens. It dares us to challenge it.

Our next sight-line cuts across the dual carriageway and finds on the other side, a diminutive light grey rotunda peeking over a wall to blink smoky rectangular eyes at us. I almost clap my hands in delight. A new-born castle. It seems unaware of the expanse of hills crawling up behind it and I suddenly feel sorry for it. Likewise, the big broken bellies of the ancient furnaces at the bottom of Bower Spring. They have no business next to the busy road and seem to work as heads on spikes: atrocities to warn those who might dare to cart the idea of heavy industry back to these parts.

Copper Street is pleasantly steep. Halfway up it, my partner is sickened by a wide and secure-looking mid-blue bungalow but I feel somehow comforted. I think it is the width; the kind of footprint that a make-shift African clinic might have. My partner canʼt get past the upsetting blue and suggests demolition,

favouring instead the old church across the lane. I wonder at this point if our force fields are interfering with each other and we are malfunctioning, and I find myself thinking again about the rifts apparent between form and function around here.

“A warning then. If you live in Upperthorpe and hear something in the night, it may be St. Vincentʼs church, suddenly awake in the middle of its car park, calling out in brick that itʼs had enough of johnnies and youʼll hear the asphalt rip and a piercing screech as the tower scrapes the reluctant nave off down Solly Street.”

Off Gibraltar Street, the word CUPOLA winks at me. The street sign sits at toddler height and there is a toddlerʼs cheek to it. Such a singular name, one word on the sign for a barely seen narrow strip (Absurdity or humility? ) The letters look so

important and the sign makes me feel, at once, daring and rooted. My partner asks me if I know what Cupola refers to. I tell him that I do. We move on toward Copper Street. I look to the road and think about how the chosen response feels hard won but worth it then I marvel that it can be crafted so quickly (while allowing that is processed from the raw by systems perfected for millennia). Between reptiles and robots thereʼs us. A sense of settling occurs. We move on.

Looking at the view beyond our final sight-line at the top of Furnace Hill I feel the hot air in my head take me up a foot or two. Might these unexpected juxtapositions give us a new aesthetics or just a twisted old one? I know that hopelessness can be beautiful. The unlikely marriage of recognisable forms works for Miro, why not for this enclave of Sheffield? Anarchy does not map directly onto despair. Diamonds sit in mines for years.

We head back towards CADS and with the snapshots gaining a cumulative power, I confess to Ivan, one of the organisers, that the route we had followed and the myriad styles encountered had made me feel as if a joke were being played on us. Was it a prank, to test the elastic of our aesthetic belief? How could these architectural elements and hybrids and ready-mades and ruins sit silently beside each other? With such questions we had payed Upperthorpe some attention and I played with idea that we might have invigorated the neighbourhood with our wonder.

A warning then. If you live in Upperthorpe and hear something in the night, it may be St. Vincentʼs church, suddenly awake in the middle of its car park, calling out in brick that itʼs had enough of johnnies and youʼll hear the asphalt rip and a piercing screech as the tower scrapes the reluctant nave off down Solly Street.

Overlaying the mapOverlaying the map with numerical data showed that many of our feelings corresponded to hidden characteristics of the buildings.(listed buildings/crime rates/car parks/pre-war/residential/business rates)

We photograph “our” mapCADS interior shot with intern (not Mike)

A FreakometerWith words we measured what streets and buildings and context made us feel stretch to stretch. How the sights affected us now became a mapping possibility.

Route HOur Route. My scratchings. No neon.

I forgot to ask other participants if they felt constrained by producing responses in the company of others. I felt that lone walks may have produced different feelings and therefore responses.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMANDA CRAWLEY-JACKSON AND RACHEL GENN

Consensus?Having to produce a written response to prescribed views of buildings was a novel way of knowing an area. It meant a stiller eye and a deeper digging for why we felt the way we did.

Hereʼs what I thinkOur feelings were transferred from sheets to stickers to form the large sensual map of the area (right).

Each observed building had been mapped by Ivan and Katia onto a massive white board. Every sticker had its corresponding building. With our route stickers on the board, we were asked to see if we observed any groupings or emergent ideas that caught our eye.

I wondered if our feelings might vary along psychological dimensions such as uncanniness, despair, disgust, elation as a function of our routes.

A Sense of Wonder (muted)The workshoppers returned (geographers, sound artist, architectural students, planner, writers etc.) and seemed quietly amazed by what they had found in the street twists up and around CADS.

Katia and IvanHelp to show us how we feel

My grouping was labeled Which Lady You Like? and Katia asked me why I had chosen that. I explained to her that the sensual descriptors applied to buildings in this corner of the map (CALM/OASIS/WILLING/WAITING TO PLEASE/ROMANTIC/INTIMATE/QUIET/ARTIFICIAL) were ones that might easily be applied to blow-up dolls.

I donʼt know if that was what they were looking for.

Which Lady You Like?I spotted a loose grouping. The scattering of rectangles that I wanted to net with tracing paper followed trajectories of teeth knocked out in a fight.