MK Gallery in Milton Keynes

MK Gallery

MK Gallery in Milton Keynes
Address: 900 Midsummer Blvd, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Completion:16.3.2019
Price:13 900 000 Euro


Landscape architecture: Jonathan Cook / JCLA
Collaboration: Jackson Coles LLP
Artistic collaboration: Gareth Jones & Nils Norman
Original design of the theater and museum: LCE andrzej blonski architects, 1997-99
Urban design: Derek Walker, 1967-76

Milton Keynes, located 80 km northwest of London, officially became a city on January 23, 1967. The project, which today spans 90 km² and has over 200,000 residents, was designed in the 1960s by British urban planner Derek J. Walker (1929-2015), who served as chief city architect in the 1970s. The grid layout of the street network was based on the work of California urban theorist Melvin M. Weber (1921-2006). The reason for the creation of new towns around London was the British government's decision in response to a long-term housing shortage after World War II. Milton Keynes was initially planned as a large self-sufficient city located approximately equidistant from London, Birmingham, Leicester, Oxford, and Cambridge.
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Milton Keynes is a utopian urban project of the late 1960s. LA and the Garden City are woven together into a carpet grid laid over the rolling Buckinghamshire landscape. The new building for MK Gallery in Milton Keynes is located at the top end of Midsummer Boulevard where the city meets Campbell Park, establishing the centre of a new arts quarter.
A new wing consisting of a simple rectangular form wrapped in corrugated stainless steel recalls the rigorous grid that underpins the city, once a playground for British modernists and the early pioneers of High-Tech. Its polished facade shifts ambiguously between reflection and opacity, while a circular window frames views over the orbital landforms and belvedere of Campbell Park. The city grid is suggested the walls and the landscape in the window. The gridded rectangle houses an assembly of new gallery spaces and an education studio below an auditorium. The axial arrangement of galleries, with windows aligned on either end, recalls the layout of the city.
6a architects

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