When the Tate Gallery split in half at the turn of the millennium, John Miller was the architect who turned its original Millbank home into Tate Britain. The new development, Tate Modern, carved out of the brick cliff of the former Bankside power station by Herzog & de Meuron, attracted larger crowds. But in architectural terms the remodelling of the somewhat underpowered classicism of Tate Britain by Miller and his wife and architectural partner, Su Rogers, was equally significant.
Miller, who has died aged 93, was allergic to the idea of iconic architecture. His approach to creating spaces for art was the opposite of the wave of attention-seeking and aggressive signature designs that have come to be associated with 21st-century museum building. Miller and Rogers added a sequence of new galleries to Tate Britain, increasing its size by a third, and created a handsomely proportioned new entrance, but made it seem as if almost nothing new had happened.
The beautifully lit, characterful galleries were abstractions of the spaces in the original building, and deftly dealt with the problem shared by almost all 19th-century art museums, making effective use of a series of redundant courtyards and an ill-lit basement no longer fit for its original purpose of storage space. As the Architectural Review commented at the time, it was a project “entirely without tiresome vanity”, but which nevertheless was pleasurable to visit. That lack of vanity was a quality I was able to observe as both a critic, and as his son-in-law.
Miller’s long career was a series of constructive dialogues with the work of other architects of every persuasion, from William Henry Crossland’s hallucinogenic recreation of a full-blown Loire chateau in Egham, Surrey, where Miller and Alan Colquhoun inserted chemistry laboratories into the gardens of Royal Holloway College in 1970, to the heroic classicism of William Henry Playfair’s insitutional buildings in Edinburgh.
In the right circumstances, as in the angular geometry of the vivid green steel and glass home, Pillwood House, that he designed for his father-in-law, Marcus Brumwell, on a coastal site in Cornwall, and which now has listed status, he was prepared to experiment. His theatre in Runcorn, Cheshire, The Brindley (2004), and the energy-efficient Elizabeth Fry building (1995) on the University of East Anglia campus, show this aspect of his work.
But he was intrigued by the possibilities of exploring what he called architectural custom and fascinated by architectural history. It is that spirit that guided his project, also opened in 2004, to link two of Edinburgh’s greatest neoclassical buildings, the Doric temple that houses the Royal Scottish Academy facing Princes Street, and the National Gallery of Scotland behind it on the Mound – both designed by Playfair. He deftly inserted a new entrance in Princes Street Gardens to connect them, and added all the shops, cafes and interpretation galleries that modern museums depend on in an underground space.
In Cambridge he worked with equal discretion on the Roman monument that is George Basevi’s Fitzwilliam Museum, creating a new enclosed courtyard space that opened in 2004.
He remodelled the quirky Arts and Crafts architecture of Charles Harrison Townsend’s Whitechapel Gallery for his long-term client Nicholas Serota, a project for which he was shortlisted for the EU Mies van der Rohe award in 1988. Serota once described Miller’s work as being “like a well cut suit”.
He continued: “The elegance of his architectural language has an ease which conceals the rigour and determination of his practice.” At the height of the campaign against modernism by the then Prince of Wales, during which in 1984 he attacked the National Gallery’s chosen extension scheme as a “carbuncle”, the discretion of Miller’s approach made Colquhoun and Miller serious contenders for the commission. The project eventually went to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
Miller belonged to the generation of British architects who started in practice inspired both by the design language of Le Corbusier and by a sense of social purpose. They included his friends James Stirling, Neave Brown, Douglas Stephen, Robert Maxwell and the architectural critic Kenneth Frampton.
He began his career building for local authorities, designing schools and retirement homes. His generation of architects combined teaching with practice – in Miller’s case, first as a visiting critic, at Cornell and Princeton in the US.
Later, in 1972-73, he taught in the school of architecture at University College Dublin, where his students included a generation of young architects who have transformed Irish buildings. He was the professor of environmental design at the Royal College of Art for a decade (1975-85) and secured professional recognition for its well-regarded architecture course.
Born in London, John was the elder of two sons of Brenda (nee Borrett) and Charles Miller, who owned Durrants hotel in Marylebone. He went to the Hall school in Hampstead and, after being evacuated at the start of the second world war, to Charterhouse, in Surrey.
He sat his entrance exam for the Architectural Association in the British army’s Benghazi barracks while doing his national service in Libya. After graduating in 1955, he worked for the practice Lyons Israel Ellis, where he met Colquhoun, with whom he went into partnership in 1961, after a brief period with Sir Leslie Martin in Cambridge.
When Colquhoun retired in 1990, Miller, Rogers – who had joined in 1986 – and Richard Brearley continued the partnership as John Miller + Partners until Miller’s retirement in 2009. He was made CBE in 2006.
Miller had a mischievous curiosity and the ability to charm the most colourful of his clients – who included Jocelyn Stevens at the Royal College of Art, Timothy Clifford at the National Galleries of Scotland, and Julia Peyton-Jones, when he renovated the Serpentine Gallery in 1998.
He married his first wife, the journalist Patricia Rhodes in 1957. They had two daughters, Sarah and Harriet. They divorced in 1976. He married Su Rogers (nee Brumwell, previously married to Richard Rogers) in 1985; her three children, Ben, Zad and Ab, became his stepsons. They all survive him, along with 13 grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
• John Harmsworth Miller, architect, born 18 August 1930; died 24 February 2024
