The Bartlett
Summer Show 2022
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Softening Milton Keynes

Project details

Programme
Unit PG17
Year 5

Central Milton Keynes is an experiential context of rigid living, where everything is organised around a strict grid to make the city more efficient and easier to navigate. The grid makes urban components of the city feel univalent and separate, when life in Milton Keynes becomes a series of discrete experiences, clear-cut roles, and identities.

Within this context, the project endeavours to become a space of dalliance and play that transcends the regularity of Milton Keynes and softens its hard-edged, empty streets. The proposed park becomes a respite from daily life, a change of climate, where the alienation we feel in the city becomes the poetic alienation we feel in nature.

The layout challenges both the spatial hierarchy and its absence. Juxtaposition of the pavilions is designed to lead the visitor without a specific direction, but more intuitively, where most routes allow one to participate in a variety of meanings and distractions. The park is therefore a highly complex design of many elements, where architecture frames both nature and the city and offers a sense of variation within unity.

The Interplay

Architecture is in between – a sculptural object that materialises some of the energy we get from human interaction and evokes the sense of softness and warmth of a human body.

Poetic Loneliness

The park is designed to transcend the feeling of alienation. Some parts are enclosed and allow visitors to hide and feel safe. Others confront visitors with the discomfort of feeling exposed.

The Intention

The design looks at two bodies: the human and the built body. Bodily configurations of intimacy and warmth are translated into design: holding someone’s hand, touching someone’s neck, leaning on someone’s shoulder.

Gestures

The park is connected to Milton Keynes: physically by providing new access, activating streets, and visually by framing the city. The outside wall is talking to the city, the inside wall is talking to me.

The Truth

People come and go, history re-writes itself but nature stays and acts on a time scale that we as humans will never understand.

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2022
01 – 16 July 2022
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