In memoriam: John Miller (1930-2024)

The architect John Miller died on 24 February 2024, aged 93. In a career that spanned six decades, his reserved but refined approach to modern architecture enamoured him to many important cultural and educational clients around the UK. 

John Harmsworth Miller was born in London in August 1930, educated at Charterhouse and then did National Service in North Africa. After studying at the Architectural Association in the early 1950s, Miller undertook his apprenticeship in a London scene that was bursting with post-war optimism and finally in thrall to the modernist ideas that had started circulating before the war. 

John Miller: his life and work

His contemporaries included James Stirling, Neave Brown, the historian and critic Kenneth Frampton, as well as Alan Colquhoun (1921 – 2012), with whom he founded Colquhoun + Miller in 1961. The office started modestly but soon found itself in demand for its sensitive approach to housing design, as well as major interventions in key cultural buildings. 

The most notable of these was perhaps Tate Britain, which was thoroughly overhauled at the turn of the century, to make the most of the space gained by the creation of Tate Modern. Other projects include renovations of the Whitechapel Gallery (1987) and Serpentine Gallery (1998), places where the original architecture had to be respected and retained, as modern facilities were woven into their fabric. 

Standalone buildings like the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Brindley Theatre in Runcorn, Cheshire (both completed in 2004, when the practice name had changed to John Miller + Partners to reflect Colquhoun’s retirement), attest to this mix of civic responsibility and respect for history, mixed with a dash of quiet experimentalism. 

In addition to the quality of his designs, Miller’s personal life also saw him entwined with the top tier of British architecture. His second wife, Su Brumwell, had been married to Richard Rogers, and one of Miller’s most accomplished residential projects, Pillwood House in Cornwall (1974), was designed for Su’s parents, who had previously commissioned Team 4 (Su Brumwell, Wendy Cheesman, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Georgie Wolton) to design Creek Vean. In 1986, Su joined Colquhoun, Miller and Partners. 

Both houses are now listed, and Pillwood is even more prototypical of the high-tech style that Team 4’s founders would go on to popularise, with its green steel frame and staircase and use of materials like fibreglass. Miller’s subsequent work with Colquhoun represents a more conventional materiality. Nevertheless, their housing was especially interesting for the way it found a playful expression of London’s rich and varied vernacular; they built council houses in Camden that blended Le Corbusian white-walled rigour with the idiosyncrasies of Victorian housing. 

Alongside teaching positions at Cornell, Princeton, Manchester and Trinity College Dublin, Miller taught, alongside Kenneth Frampton, at the RCA. Here he helped inspire a new generation of designers with visits to the European pantheon of modernist classics, ensuring architecture’s potential for redefining and enhancing society was given prominence once more. 

Miller was made a CBE in 2006 and retired from practice in 2009.