As a child, long before 3D digital drawing programs, Minecraft, and other sandbox type games, I used to play with cardboard toilet roll tubes, empty breakfast cereal packets, egg boxes, and any sheet of cardboard I could find. With tape and scissors I would design intricate, expansive worlds that covered my entire bedroom floor. These miniature makeshift worlds would contain top secret rocket launching test sites, housing, shopping areas, funfairs, towers, slides, and castles. Sometimes this urban sprawl extended into the airing cupboard, where my parents would hang their homegrown marijuana (or “garden herbs”) to dry, lending an exotically scented tree canopy to my utopias.
A couple of years ago I collaborated on the redesign of MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, the utopian 1970s New Town north west of London. Together with the artist Gareth Jones and 6a architects we designed many interior and exterior features of the new building. In our designs we used Supergraphics and a color scheme based on an old Habitat color chart from the 70s. This was a gratifying and successful collaboration made all the more enjoyable by Gareth and my use of toilet rolls in the design process. We decided to use toilet rolls painted with the Habitat colors that would help us decide many of the bold color choices used on walls inside, and on the building’s facade. Playing with the colorful toilet rolls in different sequences acted as a kind of analogue algorithm from which we could make decisions about what colors worked well with others. The same design tools/toys that I had played with 40 years ago.
Nils Norman is an artist living in Amsterdam and Munich. He works across the disciplines of public art, architecture and urban planning, and often collaborates with schools and universities. His projects are playful and humorous, and strongly informed by theories of play and pedagogy. As a result, his work challenges conventions of public art and offers utopian alternatives. In 2021, the MK Gallery won the RIBA National award. See more images of the final building on 6a architects website.