John Miller, architect who brought a restrained modernism to Tate Britain and other galleries – obituary

John Miller, who has died aged 93, belonged to a remarkable generation of post-war British architects who were inspired by Le Corbusier and a strong sense of social purpose, although his own considerable artistry was often obscured by the subtlety of his designs and the modesty with which he fitted them into their surroundings.

Nicholas Serota, who employed Miller on two of his art gallery schemes, wrote that “like a well cut suit, the elegance of his architectural language has an ease which conceals the rigour and determination of his practice”.

When the Tate Gallery’s collection of international modern art moved to Bankside, Miller and his wife and architectural partner Su Rogers were chosen to restore the old site at Millbank to the original purpose of its founder, the sugar baron Sir Henry Tate, as a national gallery of British art, allowing the display of 700 to 800 paintings out of a total holding of 3,000.

A more old fashioned and self-effacing modernist than the Bankside architects Herzog & de Meuron, Miller described himself as “a bit of an old puritan”. He saw architecture in terms of abstracted, essentially Classical volumes, and the decoration at Tate Britain was pared down to the minimum, leaving the spaces to speak for themselves.

The new galleries and cavernous new entrance on Atterbury Street were undoubtedly handsome and well proportioned, yet as the Telegraph critic Giles Worsley noted, this was “architecture at its most restrained” – designed to complement the pictures, as Miller saw it, not to provide a rival attraction. The project won an RIBA national award.

The Tate Britain job came shortly after Miller had completed equally successful renewals of the 20th-century galleries at the National Portrait Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens – the former 1930s tea pavilion which had become Britain’s most popular contemporary art gallery, where he upgraded the storage and exhibition facilities and left it feeling larger, clearer and taller, while also managing to retain its casual “drop-in” identity and the elusive airiness of its spaces.

The elder of two sons, John Harmsworth Miller was born in London on August 18 1930 and educated at The Hall School, Belsize Park, and Charterhouse in Surrey.

In 1921 his parents had acquired Durrants Hotel on George Street, Marylebone, opposite the recently established Wallace Collection, and were keen for John to help run it after he left school.

Miller thus first began toying with a possible career in architecture as a way out of the hotel business. His interest in contemporary design was further boosted by a visit, aged 16, to see Britain Can Make It, the groundbreaking exhibition held at the V&A in 1946 that positioned Britain at the forefront of global industrial design.

It offered Miller a glimpse of a world with tastes that were far removed from those of the comfortable Hampstead suburb where he had grown up, and he realised that architecture might be the way into it.

While doing his National Service in North Africa, during which he drove Daimler armoured cars among the sand dunes of the Western Desert, he successfully sat his entrance exam to the Architectural Association, Britain’s leading school of architecture, in London.

His friends there would include Patrick Hodgkinson, Neave Brown and Kenneth Frampton, and during his time as an AA student Miller worked on the Festival of Britain site in 1951 as a tea boy and was taught in his final year by Peter Smithson, whose so-called “New Brutalism” style of architecture, importing modernist trends from Europe and America whilst maintaining a distinctly British approach, would have a decisive influence on Miller’s early career.

It was Smithson who in 1955 introduced the newly qualified Miller to the firm of Lyons Israel Ellis, where both James Stirling and James Gowan had worked, and which was fast gaining a reputation for rigorous and inventive work, almost exclusively for the public sector, including a string of social housing and schools projects. The most able partner, Tom Ellis, who had taught Alison and Peter Smithson at Durham, became Miller’s mentor.

There later followed a brief period working for Sir Leslie Martin (with Patrick Hodgkinson) in Cambridge before Miller went into partnership in 1961 with Alan Colquhoun, whom he had met when they both worked at Lyons Israel Ellis.
Colquhoun + Miller were responsible for an impressive body of well-known projects, including Forest Gate High School (1965), the Chemistry Labs at Royal Holloway College (1970), the Melrose Activity Centre at Milton Keynes (1975), and the refurbishment of the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1985), where Nicholas Serota was then the director.

During the 1970s Miller also worked on a series of social housing schemes, as well as the pioneering and triumphantly realised high tech steel and glass “holiday perch”, Pillwood House, on the wooded slopes of a small creek at Feock on the south coast of Cornwall, across the inlet from Creek Vean, which Su Rogers had designed with Team 4 for her father Marcus Brumwell in the 1960s. Pillwood was listed Grade II by English Heritage in 2017.

Miller’s parallel teaching career had meanwhile begun in the 1960s, when he was invited by Colin Rowe to make the first of a series of visits to Cornell. For a decade he ran a department at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington that he turned into a world-renowned postgraduate school of architecture, recruiting the likes of Kenneth Frampton, Edward Jones and James Gowan, while all the time continuing to run his practice.

His role at the RCA also led to his designing a series exhibitions on art and architecture that began to lay the foundations of his future work on art galleries.

During the 1990s he won an RIBA national award for the Queens Building at the University of East Anglia and an RIBA regional award for the energy efficient Elizabeth Fry Building, also at UEA. Other notable buildings included the Shackleton Memorial Library at the Scott Polar Institute, Cambridge University, and the extension to the Fitzwilliam Museum, also in Cambridge, both of which won RIBA regional awards.

Less successful in the eyes of some critics was his underground link between WH Playfair’s National Gallery of Scotland and his Royal Scottish Academy, to give the newly devolved Scotland a national art museum worthy of its semi-autonomous status.

The stone-clad Weston Link, completed in 2004, was Miller’s “first essay in the classical idiom”, as he put it, his client Timothy Clifford having ruled out more contemporary designs and pushed all the way for neoclassicism. “As a modernist I get teased by people a bit about this,” Miller admitted. However he also said that to have put a lightweight industrial front along there would have cut the ground away from the Playfair buildings above, visually as well as literally, so would have been wrong.

John Miller was appointed CBE in 2006. He retired in 2009.

A warm and gentle character, he derived great interest and pleasure from life. Away from architecture, he loved sailing in Cornwall and later, after his children had grown up, in the Mediterranean. He and his wife later bought a house in the South of France, where he was also very happy.

He married, first, in 1957, Patricia Rhodes. That marriage was dissolved in 1975. He and Su Rogers were married in 1985, having practised and lived together since the early 1970s, shortly after she worked on the competition for the Pompidou Centre in Paris with her first husband Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. She survives him with two daughters from his first marriage and three stepsons.

John Miller, born August 18 1930, died February 24 2024