{"id":662,"date":"2018-01-05T12:36:47","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T12:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/?p=662"},"modified":"2018-01-15T17:01:46","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T17:01:46","slug":"netherfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/netherfield\/","title":{"rendered":"Design, Architecture, Photography: Every House on Langland Road"},"content":{"rendered":"

Milton Keynes has just marked the 50th anniversary of designation as one of the UK’s last new towns. The whole\u00a0place is a remarkable piece of design research with its meticulous plans and radical\u00a0ideas which have survived, to varying degrees, both in the archive and the built environment. One of the key early objectives of the Development Corporation was to get houses built quickly: you can’t have a city without people.<\/p>\n

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Detail from architects’ 6m long design drawing of Netherfield showing context of site. Reproduced courtesy of Chris Cross.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The grid road system produced sites of around 1km square and the early housing projects were predominantly social and characteristically large scale. One of these, Netherfield, was designed in the early 1970s by four architects known as the “Grunt Group”.\u00a0Jeremy Dixon, Ed Jones, Chris Cross and Mike Gold had previously worked together on various proposals and projects including a number of social housing schemes in London.<\/p>\n

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Detail from architects’ 6m long design drawing of Netherfield showing layout of site. Reproduced courtesy of Chris Cross.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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In Milton Keynes the\u00a0group produced a rationalist vision of modern living which drew\u00a0together\u00a0modernist 20th century aesthetics with 18th century notions of context and setting. The result is a grid of 0.8km long terraces of one to three storey houses that grow out of the rise and fall of the landscape. The houses are different heights but the roofs are all level. The interiors exceed Parker Morris standards. The generous landscaping around\u00a0them is currently the subject of an avaricious\u00a0regeneration programme.<\/p>\n

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Detail from architects’ 6m long design drawing of Netherfield showing landscaping of site. Reproduced courtesy of Chris Cross.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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An exhibition exploring the development, and current state, of Netherfield, opens at the Architectural Association next week (private view 6:30pm, 11th January, 2018). Every House on Langland Road<\/em><\/a>, by Darren Umney and Simon Phipps, was funded by an Arts Council England grant and was\u00a0first shown at Milton Keynes Gallery as part of the MK50 programme.\u00a0The\u00a0show brings together a number of representations of Netherfield including original architects\u2019 drawings (one of these is a 6m x 3m long tracing paper roll which documents the whole design process) and photography of the estate as it was built and documented by John Donat.<\/p>\n

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Detail from architects’ 6m long design drawing of Netherfield showing section of housing on site. Reproduced courtesy of Chris Cross.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Material from the archives is juxtaposed with contemporary images which reflect and expose the visual impact of the buildings, the topographical sweep of the site, and the structural aesthetics of architectural photography.\u00a0A paper on the\u00a0project has been published in cultural geographies<\/a>. The exhibition\u00a0continues until 10 February. Every House on Langland Road\u00a0was funded by Arts Council England with additional support from Milton Keynes Gallery and the Architectural Association. It would not have been possible without the generosity of the architects and the patience of the archivists at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, the RIBA and the Milton Keynes City Discovery Centre. Simon’s extensive and extending photographic archive\u00a0of\u00a0post-war architecture\u00a0can be found on Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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A leporello of Every House on Langland Road, produced for the exhibition. The influence of Ed Ruscha is acknowledged.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Milton Keynes has just marked the 50th anniversary of designation as one of the UK’s last new towns. The whole\u00a0place is a remarkable piece of design research with its meticulous plans and radical\u00a0ideas which have survived, to varying degrees, both in the archive and the built environment. One of the key early objectives of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":663,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,7],"tags":[46,9,47],"class_list":["post-662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-engagement","category-design-research","tag-architecture","tag-design-history","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":685,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions\/685"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}