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MK Gallery review – sparking joy in Milton Keynes | Art and design


You may have heard that you can’t build a successful town from scratch. It will have no soul, it is claimed. It will lack that patina, that je ne sais quoi, that ineffable something or other, that deep accumulated wisdom that only comes with the inhabitation of a site over centuries. Planners may plan and architects design, goes the theory, but they can never make a real place or give it real heart.

To devotees of which belief I have news: yes you can. The evidence stands in the county of Buckinghamshire in the form of the 52-year-old, still growing town of Milton Keynes, whose quarter-million inhabitants consistently tell pollsters how much they like living there and whose youthful planners came up with a layout that still works well today. It has its own character and spirit, something to do with optimism and faith in the future, combined with an English fondness for living close to nature.

Milton Keynes Art Gallery, as newly enlarged and transformed by 6a Architects and the artists Gareth Jones and Nils Norman, seeks to capture and replenish that spirit. It pays tribute to the people who helped shape the town, such as its chief architect, Derek Walker (who died in 2015), and the makers of its graphic identity, Minale Tattersfield. It picks up themes from such things as two colour charts from a 1978 Habitat catalogue (whose founder Terence Conran was a consultant to the Milton Keynes Development Corporation), one in an earthy range, the other

MK Gallery



Photograph: Iwan Baan

in high-tech primaries. The creators of the renewed gallery then have fun with this borrowed material, making it do tricks that the original makers never imagined, but always in the cause of the town’s underlying hopefulness.

The thing you will notice first is the silvery box of the gallery’s extension, wrapped in a grid of corrugated, reflective cladding panels, a big circle incised in the side that faces away from the town, towards a park and the countryside beyond. In sunshine it is radiant, with its cylindrical stair tower spraying reflected light around its surroundings like a lawn sprinkler. At dusk it can become lurid with melting layers of colour. Then it’s like “a tie-dye T-shirt”, says Tom Emerson of 6a. Or a lava lamp, to give another period reference.

The shininess is learned from the mirror-glass, kilometre-long shopping centre that Derek Walker and his team designed on the other side of the town’s central Midsummer Boulevard from the art gallery. The latter’s grids come from the rectangular Miesian style of the same building, as well as from the underlying pattern of the town’s layout. The circle is a persistent MK motif, to be found in the mounds, ponds, topiary, amphitheatres and other features of its landscaping, in its streetlamps and its road signs.

The more you look around the town, the more circles you see, and both they and the grid will reappear – in the square tiles and round mirrors of the toilets, in the balustrades and globular light-fittings – as you go round the gallery. First, though, you have to find the front door, which is in the gallery’s original building of 1999, which was a somewhat modest companion to a substantial theatre built at the same time. This is now painted in two colours from that Habitat catalogue – a very 70s mud-and-honey combo – and decorated with a neon version of the heart motif that was used to sell the town in its early days.

The MK Gallery’s Sky Room auditorium.



The MK Gallery’s Sky Room auditorium. Photograph: Hayley Ward BA(Hons)/6a

A spare, black-framed shelter marks the entrance – a replica of the many such structures Walker and his department scattered across the town – from where you reach a sequence of high, white, rectangular exhibition galleries, whose doorways and windows are lined up so as to allow a view straight through the building to the landscape. A cafe is to the left and education spaces are off to the right, opening on to a playground. Up a level and at the far end is the Sky Room, a big hall with sliding bleachers, that can be used for lectures, parties, film screenings, recitals and performances. A grand semicircular window gazes from here over greenery, the top half the circle you saw on the silver box.

It is in many ways a simple, going-on-basic building, with the new part added to the old part in a matter-of-fact, uncomposed way. There’s this and then there’s that. Ducts and pipes are exposed and finishes include plywood and concrete. But the gallery is infused and energised by the near-obsessive application of its MK thematics, as in playground structures modelled on original features of the town’s streetscape and in the playing out of the Habitat colours.

The MK Gallery cafe bar.



The MK Gallery cafe bar. Photograph: 6a

They appear as red-yellow-white in the cafe, for example, sometimes as purple, sometimes pale turquoise, before their climax in the wall-high curtains running round the Sky Room, banded as they are with all the colours of the earthy range, an alternative rainbow of brown, ochre and greens.

Because the design has a guiding spirit, expressed as a generous but consistent set of ideas, everything feels part of the same articulated gallimaufry of MK-ism. The equal collaboration of artists and architects, a worthy but seldom-realised ambition, is here genuine, such that you can’t divide the work of one from another. The education spaces, often dutiful addenda to art museums, here connect naturally to both the exhibition galleries and the playground. They are as good as anything else. So is the “changing places” facility, a washroom and toilet equipped for people with profound and multiple disabilities.

Behind the motifs lie the bigger ideas of MK’s makers, for whom futurism came twined with the past. Their inspirations, as the gallery’s reopening exhibition will illuminate, included Los Angeles, the English garden city and the 18th-century gardens of Stowe, about 15 miles away from Milton Keynes. They had a fascination with prehistoric sites such as Silbury and Avebury, after which two of the town’s roads are named. The modern grid and the ancient circle are geometric summaries of these preoccupations.

The new gallery is a sampling of their achievement. It is a place to take the town’s pulse, as you might in a church or a town hall in a historic city. Its pleasures – the reflections, the colours – are direct and accessible.

I know 6a well, as they designed an extension to my house in 2013, so I might be biased. But their work, and that of their collaborators, (it seems to me) offers something that can also be felt in the light-filled enfilades of Milton Keynes shopping centre. It cannot often be attributed, with a straight face, to new buildings. It’s joy.

  • The new MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, opens on Saturday 16 March.



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