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![]() Little did Woodward realise at the time that he, Dixon and their friends were being headhunted. ![]() One night, working under floodlights, they were visited by Derek Walker, newly appointed chief architect to Milton Keynes, and his second-in-command Stuart Mosscrop. For the balcony overlooking Waterloo Bridge, they produced a full-size reconstruction of Vladmir Tatlin’s 1920 Monument to the Third International, for which no drawings had survived. He had been spending his evenings working with Dixon and others on the exhibition Art in Revolution held at the Hayward Gallery that April. The Shopping Building, Milton Keynes, which opened in 1979 and is now known as the Centre: MK. Woodward felt liberated by the release, he said. When he raised objections, the Smithsons fired him. By his own happy admission, Woodward had discovered sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and resented the intrusion at a weekend without even a “please”. The crunch came in 1971: he was called in one Saturday morning to move furniture. The couple had turned down commissions in order to design a British embassy in Brasília, and the abandonment of the project by the Foreign Office left them with little work, so Woodward did not see a future there. He considered Peter Smithson a brilliant “top down” designer, while Alison worked from “bottom up”. He felt the Greater London council got what it wanted at the time, and that the very large south-facing flats at the ends of the blocks in particular would have adapted well to the private sector. He also worked on Robin Hood Gardens, the controversial brutalist housing in east London, now half-demolished. He designed the interior of the residential accommodation at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. “This was like a newly qualified actor getting a call from … Peter Hall at the National Theatre,” Woodward told a Milton Keynes historian in the early 2000s. In April 1963 Woodward joined Alison and Peter Smithson’s small practice. Woodward’s team applied Buchanan’s theories in a detailed but unrealised scheme for Fitzrovia in London. His thesis on high-density housing, with Martin Haxworth and JCW Hodges, based around the London county council’s unbuilt scheme for a new town at Hook, near Basingstoke, led to them being headhunted (with Derry Burton) to work on Colin Buchanan’s report on traffic planning, Traffic in Towns.Ī government report with such impact that Penguin published it as a book in 1964, it inspired the separation of pedestrians from traffic by means of precincts and walkways over the following decade. There he made lasting friends, who included Jones, Jeremy Dixon and Tony Richardson. Christopher attended Portsmouth grammar school, where he determined to become an architect from an early age, securing a rare local authority grant to study at the Architectural Association in London, in 1957 at the height of its influence on new building in Britain. He was born in Southsea, Hampshire, the eldest child of Stanley Woodward, a naval officer, and his wife, Joan (nee Hawkesworth). Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, east London, a controversial housing scheme, was one of the projects Woodward worked on in the 1960s The rooftop service yard made this possible. For the Shopping Building, one of the focal points of the new town of Milton Keynes, he wanted to create real streets, with a building line and open-air parking. Woodward, who has died aged 83, was appalled by the dingy yet expensive basement servicing required by contemporary shopping centres at Brent Cross and Runcorn, and in the US. The hi-tech design makes this unusual solution, devised by the architect Christopher Woodward, look deceptively simple. The light comes from high clerestories over the malls, since the main roof is also the service yard for the shops, accessed by vehicles from a bridge that carries one of Milton Keynes’s many boulevards right over the middle of the building. ![]() Opened in 1979 and now rebranded the Centre: MK, it is surviving the economic downturn better than most, and its natural lighting makes shopping a more pleasant experience than in other indoor centres. The Shopping Building, an indoor mall in the heart of the city centre, serves as Milton Keynes’s high street.
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