The Shopping Building, an indoor mall in the heart of the city centre, serves as Milton Keynes’s high street. 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 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. The hi-tech design makes this unusual solution, devised by the architect Christopher Woodward, look deceptively simple.
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. 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. The rooftop service yard made this possible.
The building’s clean lines were emphasised by an external cladding of mirror glass, still novel in 1974, when the design was finalised. This was inspired not by Mies van der Rohe, as enthusiastic critics have suggested, but by a trip to Los Angeles, where Woodward admired the City Hall by César Pelli and the CNA tower (now the Superior Court tower) by Langdon & Wilson. Glass was relatively inexpensive, and suggestive of shop windows, but because it was mirrored, retailers could pile boxes against it if they wished.
Woodward was also well known as the co-author with Edward Jones of the Guide to the Architecture of London, the first comprehensive guide of its kind when first published in 1983, aimed at a general readership but written from an architect’s point of view. It went through five editions.
He was born in Southsea, Hampshire, the eldest child of Stanley Woodward, a naval officer, and his wife, Joan (nee Hawkesworth). 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. There he made lasting friends, who included Jones, Jeremy Dixon and Tony Richardson. 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.
A 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. Woodward’s team applied Buchanan’s theories in a detailed but unrealised scheme for Fitzrovia in London.
In April 1963 Woodward joined Alison and Peter Smithson’s small practice. “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. He designed the interior of the residential accommodation at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. He also worked on Robin Hood Gardens, the controversial brutalist housing in east London, now half-demolished. 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 considered Peter Smithson a brilliant “top down” designer, while Alison worked from “bottom up”. 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. The crunch came in 1971: he was called in one Saturday morning to move furniture. 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”. When he raised objections, the Smithsons fired him. Woodward felt liberated by the release, he said.
He had been spending his evenings working with Dixon and others on the exhibition Art in Revolution held at the Hayward Gallery that April. 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. 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. Little did Woodward realise at the time that he, Dixon and their friends were being headhunted. He joined one of the three groups working on designs for the new town, Central Milton Keynes (CMK), sometimes sleeping overnight in his car, a Fiat Giannini.
Mosscrop expertly guided the Shopping Building through committees, while Woodward brought in Kenny Baker, a colleague from the Smithsons’ office, as a piece of revenge. He also designed two office buildings in mirror glass for CMK, Norfolk and Ashton houses, and made initial sketches for more at Station Square. But with cuts to the public sector in 1979, Woodward felt his Shopping Building could not be bettered, and moved on.
In 1980 he turned to full-time teaching at the Bartlett School of Architecture (part of University College London), going part-time in 1995, and fully retiring in 2008. He never returned to Milton Keynes, not wanting to see how his buildings had changed over time. Instead he travelled widely, producing authoritative architectural guides to Rome, Barcelona and elsewhere; his restaurant recommendations were always also spot-on. He became a trustee of the Friends of Christ Church Spitalfields in the 1980s and helped guide its restoration over two decades.
Woodward is survived by his partner Christoph Grafe; they met in 1991 and registered their civil partnership in 2006.
• Christopher Woodward, architect, born 8 December 1938; died 9 September 2022
