Architect and professor responsible for launching the RCA RIBA Part I course, partner with both Alan Colquhoun and Su Rogers, and a sensitive designer
With John Miller’s death in February, Britain lost a distinguished architect whose 48 years of practice, between 1961 and 2009, first with the late Alan Colquhoun and then with Su Rogers after she became a partner in 1986, enabled him to realise over 50 works.
After graduating from the AA , Miller worked for Leslie Martin in Cambridge. On his return to London he worked for the prestigious training office of Lyons Israel & Ellis, for whom he would design an auxiliary building for the Old Vic Theatre. Here he met Alan Colquhoun, with whom he later entered into partnership. Early in that partnership, Colquhoun & Miller built two particularly canonical works; the brick-faced Kahnian Forest Gate High School in London (1965), arranged around a central assembly hall, and the highly systematic, 3ft-4in modular chemistry laboratory for Royal Holloway College in 1970.
Over time, in addition to brick-faced terrace housing for Milton Keynes, and carefully modulated infill academic institutions, the office began to gravitate towards museum design, which almost invariably involved a combination of partially new and old works and a reorganisation of the internal circulation.
The first work in this genre was Colquhoun & Miller’s exceptionally sensitive restoration and transformation of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Charles Harrison Townsend’s masterwork of 1899. Completed in 1987, their painstaking refurbishment has since been brutally destroyed by superfluous restorations. The second work of the office in a similar genre was its 1998 transformation of the Serpentine Tea House in Kensington Gardens, which became the Serpentine Gallery.
This, designed with Su Rogers, was followed in 2001 by the centenary transformation of Tate Britain, designed by the renamed John Miller + Partners, an extensive modification involving the insertion of a new side entrance, a major staircase and new facilities such as a bookshop, as well as a total rearrangement of the internal circulation. This was followed in 2004 by the equally challenging modification and renewal of the so-called Playfair Project in the centre of Edinburgh, which involved restoring, transforming and uniting the Royal Scottish Academy (1826) with the National Gallery of Scotland (1859), both which had been designed by William Henry Playfair in an erudite Neoclassical manner.
John Miller was an exceptionally sensitive and creative architect who was not sanguine about the culture of architecture and urbanism in our high-speed, commodity-driven, late-modern world. He sought throughout his practice an elusive synthesis between what he referred to as the customs of tradition and the innovations of modernity. Aside from this, he was a larger-than-life figure whose humour, generosity, and sheer joie de vivre charmed everyone he encountered.
Our long-standing friendship dated back to September 1950, when we entered the first year of the AA. Something of our fraternal relationship was evident in 1972, when we both applied for the professorship of interior design at the Royal College of Art, a post previously held by Sir Hugh Casson. Since we were in effect rivals, John proposed that whoever got the position appoint the other as senior tutor – which he duly did. Su Rogers, Edward Jones and I joined forces under his inspired leadership to transform what had been a department of interior design into a RIBA Part I, three-year course in architecture, from which many of our students, after two more years’ study at the AA, went on to have illustrious careers.
Kenneth Frampton is an architect, historian and emeritus professor at Columbia University