Grid, circle and shiny texture, utterly Milton Keynesian. MK Gallery by 6a architects

In the spirit of modernity the city was built on, 6a architects took on the task to add an extension to the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, England. The city's rectangular grid, the ubiquitous circle present in the town's landscaping and the shiny texture of its famous shopping mall are paid homage in the facade and interiors of the new building. 

“Milton Keynes has a fascinating origin story combining the English landscape tradition with the invention of leisure, American modernity and many other ideals. We have tried to tell its history over the decades in the form of our architecture.”

Tom Emerson. 6a architects

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.

City Club, a new public art project led by Gareth Jones and Nils Norman, moves in and around the gallery building, quoting and updating the design history of Milton Keynes. In the 1970s, City Club was a plan for a visionary leisure complex inspired by the mixed-use Real Madrid Club Complex in Spain. In the 21st century, it becomes a sequence of new public spaces spanning art, architecture and design.