32 PROJECT REPORT: CULTURAL, CIVIC & FAITH BUILDINGS
community hub, connected to an external play area, supporting what Tom says is “a big community outreach and education programme.” On the floor above, the auditorium (the ‘Sky Room’), can seat up to 300, and gives spectacular views over the park. It will be the first independent cinema in the town, run in partnership with Curzon Cinemas, as well as hosting performances and lectures, and can be hired out for weddings or corporate functions. To the south, a cylindrical fire escape, also clad in steel, contributes to the “quite constructivist, modernist sense of primary forms assembled together,” says the architect.
Coming full circle
The new building is an unashamed tribute to the design thinking that inspired the creation of Milton Keynes, tapping into to a certain strand of 1960s futuristic optimism, says Emerson. “It’s a little bit retro future, plays a little bit with ‘high-tech,’ and the sort of promise that architects in the 1960s and 70s were looking for. It’s quite fun.” The volume’s somewhat abstract, simple presentation of a circle within a gridded rectangular box is far from accidental; it’s highly context-specific. “Campbell Park, which was designed and built with the city, has this kind of spiritual, orbital geometry, with all these circles and cones,” says Emerson (they were references to English prehistoric structures). “Our building is essentially the grid of the city meets the circles in the landscape – a very simple idea of reconstituting the meeting of the city and the landscape in one building.” He says in this way it’s “a narrative of the city itself,” and it also fits into the idiom of clean-lined, modernist buildings which have appeared in the city since its birth. He compares it to the shopping centre – “a cross between Mies van de Rohe and Crystal Palace, essentially, an exquisite, repeating steel framed grid, really beautifully detailed.” However unlike that “incredibly expensive” building, similar characteristics were achieved for a far humbler budget here. Internally, the grid-based layout is
also “very Milton Keynsian,” says Emerson, “almost replaying the story of the city in the interior.” He says the idea was that “the city is also in its internal layout and details.”
Exteriors © 6a Architects
The outside of the new addition has been clad in vertically corrugated stainless
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