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A design for a distribution park in Milton Keynes emphasises its position on the margin. Neither totally gridded nor organically grown, the city has a reputation as a thoroughfare. Here, people, vehicles, and goods flow regularly through the city, the urban fabric of which swerves around existing ecological features, also importantly facilitating wildlife corridors.
A proposed model for urbanism bridges the utilitarian and industrial with the wild and earthen. The demand for distribution parks in Milton Keynes is met with a scheme that produces porous and accessible edges for the city, using metal components to contain earth quarried from the clay-rich site and form enclosures. A new development extends the city’s cycle infrastructure, capitalising on a unique opportunity for Milton Keynes to become a centre of leisure cycling and to support a local logistics trade served by cargo bikes. Distribution parks become green, peopled and community-owned spaces that operate locally and nationally, welcoming hybridity and fluidity; essential to the contemporary experience of the English landscape.
Drawing from the organic and industrial landscape of Milton Keynes, the mechanical processes of milling and pressing are used to generate an architectural language for a project that is hybrid, fluid, and based on the movement of material.
Earth for construction is quarried directly from the clay-rich site – land is shifted, and buildings arranged around the movements of material, goods and people to create a topographical jigsaw at the edge of the city.
Small rooms and cargo bike delivery hubs mediate between large distribution warehouses and a quarried wetland landscape.
A distribution park forms a porous and accessible city edge. Four strands come together to form an edge land that is ecologically and socially sensitive, designed for human-nature co-habitation as much as for the storage and distribution of goods.
Big earthen volumes and light industrial sheets nestle together to form enclosures. Metal components contain the land and provide the infrastructure to engage with the edge of city at the scale of the body and the landscape.