Learning From Milton Keynes

Conniburrow – The Suburban Grotto

By Josh Wyles

Monkston – Adventures in Low Density

By Elly Ward

Studio 2′s Introduction to the London Metropolitan University Department of Architecture and Spatial Design Summer Exhibition.

Milton Keynes is considered to be one of the most successful, large-scale development projects ever undertaken in England. The new town has enjoyed continuous population growth, up from 65,000 in 1970 to 210,000 today, and created 60,000 new households. It hosts 7,200 employers, and has been rated fifth of 48 UK cities for overall business environment.

The archetype of the low density, suburban city MK is the phenomenon at its purest and most intense. We believe a careful documentation and analysis of both its physical form and residents’ adaptation is as important to architects and urbanists today as were studies of Georgian London and ancient Rome to earlier generations. Such a study aims to contribute to the definition of this little understood urban form that is rapidly becoming the dominant form of development throughout the world.

Through open minded and nonjudgmental investigation, Studio 2 have come to understand this distinct form and begun to evolve techniques for its handling. Adapting approaches pioneered by the ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ studio at Yale, taught by Venturi Scott Brown in 1968, we have established a vocabulary of forms for residential buildings, infrastructure and a variety of civic typologies.

The main project confronts the paradox that lies at the heart of MK Man, the contradictions of the Lone Ranger vs Family Guy – to design a neighbourhood centre in the centreless city. Having interrogated the neighbourhood and the notion of the centre, and having identified the needs and aspirations of those who live there, we have each made a proposal for our individual grid squares in MK.

On one level this can be viewed as 21 individual interpretations of a neighbourhood centre for 21 sites in a suburban city. On another level it is a collective proposal for a new suburban civic architecture.

Studio 2 / AOC

Milton Keynes Lexicon

A Visual Lexicon of Milton Keynes showing 17 grid squares and 17 proposals for new suburban civic centres.

PDF of Milton Keynes Lexicon here.

1. Stantonbury – Public Lounge, Barbara Kowalska

2. Linford Wood – Coppice Office, Cindy Hidalgo Reyes

3. Neath Hill – Utopia Station, Manos Pertselakis

4. Bradwell Common – Museum of Common Treasures, Osayemi Olusola

5. Conniburrow – The Suburban Grotto, Josh Wyles

6. Downs Barn – John’s Garage, Darja Buhanovska

7. Downhead Park – The Adapt-it House, Jonathan Turney

8. CMK West – Silbury Festival Park, Sara Dabouni

9. Campbell Park – Public Back Yards, Anton Burdeiny

10. Oldbrook – Oldbrook Publido Park, Maryam Gomary

11. Fishermead – Fishermead Furniture Swapshop, Elodie Drissi

12. Springfield – Active/Passive Centre, Darta Viksna

13. Woolstone – Tesco Rural, Tom Rowland

14. Leadenhall and Coffee Hall – Civic Supercentre, Fatin Umair Gardazi

15. Eaglestone – Drive-Thru Gallery, Agata Podgajna

16. Monkston – Adventures in Low Density, Elly Ward

17. Netherfield – Productive Landscape for Netherfield, Sanna Rautio

Robert Bruegmann makes his case in the Guardian for suburban sprawl, a much maligned but misunderstood form of urbanism that was first pioneered and than pilloried in Britain.  Read more.

His book, Sprawl: A Compact History, provides one of the more balanced and rigorous investigations of the democratic world’s most popular urban form.  Early sprawl, an excerpt.

“After 70 years of suffering the slings and arrows of academic criticism, suburban life finally finds a compelling defender in Bruegmann. A professor of art history and urban planning at the University of Illinois“Chicago, Bruegmann demonstrates that urban sprawl is a natural process as old as the world’s oldest cities, wherein large metropolises reach a point of maturity and those with financial means escape the congestion and high prices of city life. What has changed over the past century, the author says, is that an increasing number of citizens have achieved the financial means to participate in what was once an exclusive luxury of the wealthy. Bruegmann acknowledges that the effects on cities are not always positive, but he also demonstrates that many of the criticisms of suburban sprawl—e.g., that it is culturally deficient and environmentally noxious—are greatly exaggerated and ignore the very real benefits sprawl offers in terms of privacy, mobility and choice. With his disdain for doomsday predictions and his disregard for the academic consensus, Bruegmann’s thorough analysis is sure to be controversial, but a shot of controversy ought to do the field, and public dialogue about it, some good.”—Publishers Weekly

TUESDAY 24TH MARCH 2009
1-2pm, The Forum, Spring House

Pierre d’Avoine of Pierre d’Avoine Architects
presents
Suburbia – opportunity or prescription?

An interest in the inter-war suburb led to a project, in the early 1990s for a site in Acton in West London, which I named the Invisible House. I see it as part of the renewed interest in typology in the 1960s.

‘Typology was an attempt to address simultaneously issues of repetition and of historical continuity in architecture. It was argued that the history of architecture resembled that of other useful crafts and instruments. Thus, like “a basket or plate or cup, the architectural object could not only be repeated, but also was meant to be repeatable.” The inherent logic of repeatability denied the uniqueness of the architectural object and linked the project with reproduction.’

The Invisible House does not aim for the tabula rasa of modernist space but was designed as a model for an approach to development in suburbs, based on the principle of densification. It is located in the back garden of an existing semi-detached house and is partially buried in the ground. As a type it is modest but has subversive intent – the infiltration of suburbia by stealth increasing density without loss of garden space. We intend it as a challenge to the suburban emphasis on the single family house – its potential as both dwelling and workplace is released by organising the internal plan as a series of loose-fit, interconnected spaces around a central courtyard.

The Invisible House - stealth densification

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Spring House, 40-44 Holloway Road, London N7 8JL

A critique of ‘Learning from Milton Keynes’
by Joe Morris, Duggan Morris Architects
visiting critic at Celebration Week at London Metropolitan University

“The Milton Keynes presentation was incredibly thorough and detailed and the extent of the research was admirable. However, my main concern is the failure of the unit to acknowledge and respond to issues of density, which is one of the most important issues facing architects, planners and urban designers, in the pursuit of place making.

It is difficult for me to comment without a fuller understanding of the unit direction, the base thinking and ultimate aims, so all of which I mention should be taken with a little pinch of salt. That aside, my own feelings were clearly aired in the discussion.

I do not believe low density, sub-urban development is the way forward at all.

I have significant reservations also about the idea that it is inevitable and perhaps ‘the most successful typology for housing and planning’.

The problems with comparing the relative ‘success(s)’ of inner city areas and further outlying lower density zones is too generic – specificity is the key here. There are always likely to be successful and less successful aspects of both, but they are doing very different things, accommodating greater variations of living and working.

Consider if you will the example of Milton Keynes, which I contest has a wholly negative image. As a garden city, it is perhaps one of the most successful examples of its kind, and revered by many architects and urban thinkers. However, its long term survival and success is the subject of ongoing investigation, and subsequently there are plans to ‘densify’ areas of the city.

Perhaps a different view point, when you pose the question ‘Learning from Milton Keynes’ is not to be so blindly accepting of it as an inevitability, or indeed a working case study.

I would be more minded to generate a balanced argument, drawing upon its uniqueness as a modernist suburban city (still waiting for city status), its antipathy of attitude in the context of the wider urban renaissance debate (the fact that things that are pejorative outside of Milton Keynes – suburbia, minimalism, underpasses, grid roads – are here defended trenchantly), its vast open faceless empty spaces in comparison with the renaissance drive for ‘place making’, and its unacceptable reliance upon the car for survival.”

Joe Morris is a director of Duggan Morris Architects.  He is one of three AJ/RPS Urban Design scholars and is conducting a six month study into Walthamstow Marshes.  

TUESDAY 17TH MARCH 2009 at London Metropolitan University
1-2pm, The Forum, Spring House

Deborah Saunt of DSDHA
presents
Paradise Park Children’s Centre, Islington

Won in a competition, DSDHA were asked to address the question of how to build in our cities when green space is at a premium. The result was an exercise in exchange whereby the loss of open green space is compensated by designing a new park building with the UK’s first vertical garden of over 7,000 plants.

At an urban scale the community building acts as a catalyst to the regeneration of the park and local area, and it is both iconic and welcoming. Technically, the building incorporates sustainable features such as irrigation systems using harvested rainwater and recycled brown roofs to encourage biodiversity. It was a challenge for the multi-headed client, architect and design team to try to achieve all the project goals both technically and socially, so there were lots of lessons learnt.

“Not as didactic as a billboard it communicates something fragile, delightful and rare. The building is intended to let the community be how it wants to be. It is a small and idealised bioculture, but one that appeals on different levels, to the senses of smell and sight, and to the mind.”
Kieran Long, AJ

The made and the grown: an evolving facade communicates the promise of growth

Hosted by LMU Department of Architecture and Spatial Design
Spring House, 40-44 Holloway Road, London N7 8JL

A presentation by Elly Ward 
on Tuesday 3rd March 2009 
as part of Celebration Week at London Metropolitan University 

 
In his 1978 manifesto ‘Delirious New York’, Rem Koolhaas celebrates the experience of living in a metropolitan, hyper-dense environment. He defines this urban condition as a “Culture of Congestion”. 

Living in London’s ‘Culture of Congestion’ it is sometimes easy to forget that the majority of people in the UK prefer to live in low density suburban neighbourhoods.  The definition of suburbia now embraces a wide range of developments from New Towns to Council Estates. National Census figures show that 86% of the British population now live in one of these 3 suburban categories:

It is clear that the old stereotypical associations are no longer relevant to what are actually vibrant sites of social mobility and ethnic diversity. 

Many examples of modern suburbia in fact now offer a model for local living in a global society. 

[Read over advert]
Milton Keynes is considered to be one of the most successful, large-scale development projects ever undertaken in England. Recently celebrating its 40th birthday, Milton Keynes has enjoyed continuous population growth, up from 65,000 in 1970 to 210,000 today, and created 60,000 new households. It hosts 7,200 employers, and has been rated fifth of 48 UK cities for overall business environment. Even Coutts Bank recently opened a branch in Milton Keynes in response to research suggesting that the city is “a haven for the millionaires of the future”.

[1min 56sec]
…..“Wouldn’t it be nice, if all cities were like Milton Keynes.”

Manhattan is the archetype of the high density, urban city and in Delirious NY Koolhaus describes it as the ‘20th Century’s Rosetta Stone’:

• a blueprint for the Culture of Congestion;
• a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture;
• the grid as a framework for a collection of blocks whose proximity and juxtaposition reinforce their separate meanings.  

Milton Keynes is the UK archetype of the low density, suburban city and could perhaps become the 21st Century’s Rosetta Stone; a test bed for this new, increasingly prevalent, and therefore important, type of urban form.

Like Manhattan, Milton Keynes has been developed within a planned, robust grid, one that actively encourages a diversity of designs and seeks to avoid the homogeneity associated with much modernist city-making. 49 distinct grid squares provide 49 individual experiments into suburban living. The grid squares accommodate a variety of typologies, tenures, uses and forms – an existing village sits happily between a Dixon Jones-designed linear modernist housing scheme and a Scandinavian-inspired development of cul-de-sacs.

In an attempt to conduct an open minded and non-judgemental investigation into Milton Keynes we adapted the techniques pioneered by the ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ studio at Yale, taught by Venturi Scott Brown in 1968.

In the first semester, each of us took a Milton Keynes grid square as our site of enquiry. We began by approaching it from a distance using Giambattista Nolli’s plan of Rome as a precedent for developing our own understanding of how the suburban public and private spaces worked.

Next, we visited the site, stayed a night and established our own visual lexicon for Milton Keynes.  Establishing a vocabulary of forms for residential buildings, infrastructure and a variety of civic typologies provided both a shared language of references for the studio and an understanding of how the suburban experiments of each grid square worked.

Towards the end of semester one’s investigations we visited Philadelphia and Manhattan. In Philadelphia, we met with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and presented our ideas to them at their studio in Manayunk. In the meeting, we explored the importance of symbolism in architecture, the nature of the suburban context and the development of a suburban civic. 

Through both this meeting and subsequent building visits in Philadelphia (including theirs, Louis Kahn and Frank Furness) we began to develop a shared studio conversation about designing in suburbia.

In Manhattan, each of us carried out comparative analysis of our grid square with a similar New York neighbourhood.  The comparison provided further insights into the similarities and differences between Rem’s ‘Culture of Congestion’ our own ‘Suburban City’.

Having both interrogated the neighbourhood and the notion of the centre, and having identified the needs and aspirations of those who live there, we have now each developed a brief for a neighbourhood centre. A new proposal for a building, or collection of buildings, that go some way towards defining a Suburban Civic Architecture for the 21st Century.

So, what did we learn from Milton Keynes?  And what are we designing for this suburban city?
Findings to follow in future posts.

To conclude, in Learning from Milton Keynes we have developed an understanding of the formal, social and programmatic demands upon civic buildings in the archetypal suburban situation. As part of our explorations we have invited a number of practising architects to present buildings that suggest possible tactics for designing an appropriate architecture for suburbia in the 21st century.

Drawing from these contemporary examples and our own investigations we are now each making proposals for our individual grid squares in MK. On one level this can be viewed as 21 individual interpretations of a neighbourhood centre for 21 sites in a suburban city. On another level it is a collective proposal for a new suburban civic architecture.

Thank you.

Words & image selection by Elly Ward & Geoff Shearcroft 

TUESDAY 10TH MARCH 2009 at London Metropolitan University
1-2pm, The Forum, Spring House

David Kohn of David Kohn Architects
presents
Heterotopia: A zero carbon art garden in the Thames Gateway

The Arts Space of the Future should be a place in which to question our everyday reality, a place once removed from contemporary metropolitan lifestyles, where other lives can be imagined and enacted. Heterotopia is a garden that sustains buildings and imaginations. Newly planted forests are coppiced to provide fuel to run new arts facilities. This in turn creates a changing network of forest clearings in which to host temporary arts events to fire the imagination.

Passive consumers become active producers

Hosted by LMU Department of Architecture and Spatial Design
Spring House, 40-44 Holloway Road, London N7 8JL