Polina Morova
Central Milton Keynes is an experiential context of rigid living, where everything is organised around a strict grid to make the city more efficient and easier to navigate. The grid makes urban components of the city feel univalent and separate, when life in Milton Keynes becomes a series of discrete experiences, clear-cut roles and identities.
Within this context, the project endeavours to become a space of dalliance and play that transcends the regularity of Milton Keynes and softens its hard-edged empty streets. The proposed park becomes a respite from daily life, a change of climate, where alienation we feel in the city becomes the poetic alienation we feel in nature.
The layout challenges both the spatial hierarchy and its absence. Juxtaposition of the pavilions is designed to lead the visitor without a specific direction, but more intuitively, where most routes allow one to participate in a variety of meanings and distractions. The park is therefore a highly complex design of many elements, where architecture frames both nature and the city and offers a sense of variation within unity.
