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Architect John Miller passed away on February 24, 2024 at the age of 93. Over a career that spanned 60 years, his restrained and sophisticated approach to modern architecture won him the favor of many important cultural and educational clients across the UK.
John Harmsworth Miller was born in London in August 1930 and educated at Charterhouse College before serving in the military in North Africa. After studying at the Architectural Association in the early 1950s, Miller began his apprenticeship in a London scene steeped in postwar optimism, and was eventually attracted to the modernist ideas that had begun to circulate before the war.
John Miller: his life and work
His contemporaries included James Stirling, Neave Brown, historian and critic Kenneth Frampton, and Alan Cole Colquhoun + Miller co-founded Colquhoun + Miller in 1961 with Alan Colquhoun (1921 – 2012). Housing design approaches and significant interventions in key cultural buildings.
Perhaps the most notable of these is Tate Britain, which was overhauled at the turn of the century to make the most of the space gained with the creation of Tate Modern. Other projects included the refurbishments of the Whitechapel Gallery (1987) and the Serpentine Gallery (1998), where the original architecture had to be respected and preserved as modern facilities were incorporated.
Stand-alone buildings such as the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Brindley Theater in Runcorn, Cheshire (both completed in 2004, when the firm’s name was changed to John Miller + Partners to reflect Colquhoun’s retirement), are testament to civic responsibility and a commitment to history. respect, mixed with a hint of quiet experimentalism.
As well as the quality of his designs, Miller’s personal life also closely linked him to Britain’s top buildings. His second wife, Su Brumwell, married Richard Rogers, and one of Miller’s most successful residential projects, Pillwood House in Cornwall (1974), was Designed for Sue’s parents, who had previously commissioned the design from Team 4 (Sue Broomwell, Wendy Cheeseman, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Georgie Walton) Creek Vean. In 1986, Sue joined Colquhoun, Miller and Partners.
Two houses are now on the market, with the Pillwood exemplifying the high-tech style that the Team 4 founder would later popularize, with its green steel frame and stairs and use of materials such as fiberglass. Miller’s subsequent collaborations with Colquhoun represented a more traditional materiality. Nonetheless, their housing is particularly interesting as it expresses London’s rich and varied dialect in an interesting way. They built the Council House in Camden, blending the white-walled rigor of Le Corbusi with the idiosyncrasies of Victorian housing.
In addition to teaching at Cornell University, Princeton University, the University of Manchester and Trinity College Dublin, Miller taught at the RCA with Kenneth Frampton. Here, through visits to the classic pantheon of European modernism, he helped inspire a new generation of designers, ensuring that architecture’s potential to redefine and enhance society was once again valued.
Miller was awarded a CBE in 2006 and retired in 2009.
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