Foster + Partners have released images of their proposed Mullin Automotive Park at Enstone Airfield, now submitted for planning permission. Intended as a “automotive museum in the heart of the British countryside” the scheme will rehabilitate a disused airfield to support a growing community of classic automobile collectors.
Acording the statement by Foster + Partners, the museum seeks to capture not just the history of automobiles over the last century, but also be an open-ended collection that charts the changing face of mobility in the future. It will be a centre of knowledge, education and excellence that showcases the extraordinary impact automobiles have had and will continue to have on our lives.

“We are delighted to be part of this exciting new development that represents the convergence of mobility and lifestyle to create a new vision for the future. The Mullin Automotive Park will be a unique cultural destination set in Cotswold countryside, that seeks to support the wider community as well as providing a special experience for classic automobile collectors.”
Gerard Evenden, Head of Studio, Foster + Partners

The design draws inspiration from the idea of a rural estate, a journey through a carefully considered landscape towards the main building that forms an integral part of the overall experience for visitors. A small cluster of workshop type buildings with visitor facilities including the ticket office and café are located at the entrance of the site. From here, visitors can walk to the museum at the heart of the site, nestled within the landscape.

Designed as a collection of buildings arranged in a crescent, the museum will be the focal point of the entire development, allowing for most of the site to remain as green parkland. The automotive park also features roads that are especially designed for ‘exercising’ cars from the Mullin collection, allowing visitors to have an immersive experience. The proposals also include a series of residential pavilions and landscaped lodges bringing automotive enthusiasts closer to their collections.

The built form of the museum will be orientated to maximise for thermal performance along with other passive measures and renewable technologies that minimise energy consumption. The proposal also addresses future flexibility and the ability to anticipate changes in the future.
 
“By any conventional measure this will not just be another car museum. We have had the automobile for just over a century, but my great grandchildren will probably never drive a motor car - at least not as we know it. Instead they will travel in secure autonomous pods controlled by a computer.

The Mullin Automotive Park will tell the powerful story of the automobile and its role in shaping our societies, while also offering a view into the myriad possibilities that the future holds.”
Peter Mullin, Founder, Mullin Automotive Park
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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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Published on: January 19, 2019
Cite: "Foster + Partners to design Mullin Automotive Park at former Enstone Airfield" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/foster-partners-design-mullin-automotive-park-former-enstone-airfield> ISSN 1139-6415
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