Interview with Syd Green (part 1)
Syd Green describes how he came to be an architect, and talks about working in private practice on developing a large covered shopping centre in Luton. He gained valuable experience on this complex project, but but then moved applied to Milton Keynes; in January 1971 he was interviewed by Derek Walker and appointed to the team. He notes that he was more interested in ‘the space created in buildings and how it was used’ than the hi-tech ideas. After an initial period with little or no work, Syd was appointed by Derek Walker to the CMK team, knowing ‘…that I had the organizational ability to get it moving’.
Initially Syd did a lot of research on car parking. Then, working on options for grid roads, he was involved in discussions with the engineers to ‘actually make it …fit with the grid work of the city roads’. His role was liaison with other departments while the team was working on detailed infrastructure design, because in the early days the CMK team did not include members of all the professions working together. He comments: ‘Derek Walker had the sense to let these guys (Stuart Mosscrop and Chris Woodward) get on and do the design’. Syd was appointed project manager for the Shopping Building and was on site to coordinate the work: he talks of the great importance of keeping such a huge project (nearly £25 million) under control; being in control of the contractors, specifying all the details from day one. He had learnt from some bad experience in Luton.
Syd remembers briefing Helmut Jacoby to produce drawings of the CMK project, taking with him only architectural plans and sections of CMK. He describes his meeting, and says: ‘I was absolutely gobsmacked when those drawings came back. …That was one of the great experiences’. Talking of the importance of drawings and models for visualising a finished building in the 1970s, Syd notes that today computers enable this easily. Syd records that his proposal for the design of the service road was adopted: bringing in the service road above a low crossing arcade within the building and screening it from the shoppers with opaque glass in the upper storey at that point; he says this gave the building ‘this feeling of light … there isn’t another shopping centre… that has achieved that sort of feeling’. He pays tribute to the many contributions which made up the final CMK design: ‘we had a wonderful design team’.
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