Doncaster Sheffield Airport is currently up for a prestigious architectural award, well, a design that re-imagines its use is anyway. The Yorkshire airport is set to reopen so the design is little more than food for the imagination, but it certainly is an interesting design.
The terminal has been re-imagined as a shared community housing scheme that repurposed plane cockpits for children to play in. The design was for the Davidson Prize, an architectural award to tasks designers to come up with new plans for redundant buildings The design also included a co-living space with room for 15,000 homes – a housing estate inside the terminal building with homes utilising old aeroplanes, and rewilding the runways.
Doncaster Council agreed a 125-year lease of Doncaster Sheffield Airport with the owners of Peel after the site closed back in November 2022 blaming spiralling costs . An operator is still to be announced, but could be in the next few years.
The prize was aimed at architects, academics, gardeners, structural and aerospace engineers who were given the task of coming up with a creative solution for the housing crisis. The proposal that was put forward by Alma-nac architects Chris Bryant and Rachel Foreman, is one of three for the architectural award The Davidson Prize.
The pair worked with structural engineer Brian Constant, University of Westminster gardener/architect Eric Guidbert and aerospace engineer Mark Blackwell. Check out the re-imagined space design below:
Speaking about the creative solution using the 300-hectare site Bryant said: “Airports are well connected. They’re pretty soulless places, but there’s also huge amounts of land.” The infrastructure we have now will not be the infrastructure that we need in 25 years. So we are going to be left with airports and airfields.
“Commercial airports tend to be very well connected to city centres, have large areas of flat land, they have big sheds which are brilliant to use either to create really interesting housing or to create community spaces or a space to build new housing.”
The award winners are set to be announced today (19th June).
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