New City Place

New City Place in central Milton Keynes presents exciting opportunities to create a dynamic new focal point for civic life and is illustrative of the cultural potential for city centre business districts and their ability to attract tenants. Critically, the landmark buildings at New City Place are not the centre of attention here; it is the ambition to maximise the public floor plane that will invigorate this piece of the city to create a special and enduring place.

The public squares and the street are the central elements of the composition, and the buildings seamlessly merge with them, a factor now possible as the boundaries between public, commercial and private uses continue to hybridise and form complementary bonds.

The design explores a very different relationship between indoor and outdoor space. The buildings are raised from the ground floor with the resulting double-height public space adjoining the plazas. Collectively this is a cutting-edge flexible diagram, “a gigantic living room”, that will allow space to breathe, to socially distance or meet and play, a new sustainable lifestyle for the human development experience.