Sir Colin St John Wilson - Independent Online Edition (original) (raw)

Colin Alexander St John Wilson, architect: born Cheltenham, Gloucestershire 14 March 1922; Assistant, Housing Division, Architects' Department, LCC 1950-55; Lecturer, School of Architecture, Cambridge University 1955-69, Professor of Architecture 1975-89 (Emeritus); Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge 1962-71, Honorary Fellow 1998-2007; Fellow, Pembroke College, Cambridge 1977-2007; Kt 1998; married 1955 Muriel Lavender (marriage dissolved 1971), 1972 Mary Jane Long (one son, one daughter); died London 14 May 2007.

Colin St John Wilson can hardly have anticipated, as a 40-year-old Lecturer in the Cambridge School of Architecture in 1962, when he was commissioned with Leslie Martin to design a new building to rehouse the British Museum library, that he would be embarking on a project which would consume most of his remaining professional life. It would become what he referred to as his "thirty years' war".

The story of the British Library has been told before and will be told again. The original proposals for Bloomsbury were stymied by the newly emergent forces of conservation. The site was moved to King's Cross and there the project was subject to government stop-and-go policies, with a succession of cuts reducing it to half its original size. As late as 1991, the budget for important works of art was cancelled. The Prince of Wales denounced it as "an academy for secret police", and the Secretary of State for Heritage, David Mellor, damned the architect as "no bloody good" in a radio interview. Wilson was enormously hurt by the whole tortured and humiliating experience, and his architectural practice suffered to the extent that a new practice under the name of M.J. Long (his second wife) had to be set up.

But Wilson's scheme, even though reduced in scale, was finally built, with its marvellous spatial quality and craftsmanship intact. His clients kept faith. This was and remains immensely important to the achievement because, during the controversial gestation of great projects, it may be difficult for everyone but the architect to believe in and remain committed to the long-term vision. Without that commitment and a determined client, projects can become vulnerable to expediencies which reflect the short-term views of project management.

The library escaped this fate; the vision has been realised with some of the most marvellous interiors of 20th- century British architecture. These spaces, starting with the entrance hall, are literally sensational, visceral, and a reminder that great architecture, like music, can have an immediate emotional impact, that sublime sense of amazement and of being momentarily overwhelmed.

Yet the British Library, like all Wilson's buildings, is also inviting. The visitor is looked after and can see where to go and where the great reading rooms are. These rooms do not offer the single great idea, like Sydney Smirke's circular reading room in the British Museum, but offer a psychological equivalent of the experience of landscape and the atavistic choices we make about where we feel comfortable, whether to enjoy a promontory, a fold in a valley or the seclusion of an enclosure. The library, in particular the humanities reading room, is the construction of the ideas Wilson set out in his essay "The Natural Imagination", one of a series of seminal essays in his book Architectural Reflections (1992).

Going up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1940, Wilson started reading History and then changed to Architecture, having been drawn to the idea of being a painter. Instead he became a prodigious collector of contemporary British art. Wilson returned to Cambridge University in 1955, having been invited by Professor Leslie Martin to join his staff in the School of Architecture. He had worked with Martin and a remarkable group of architects in what he referred to as the "brave new world days" of the London County Council Architects' Department, 1950-55.

"Sandy" Wilson taught me as an undergraduate in the Cambridge School of Architecture and I was subsequently a lecturer in the School during his Professorship. So he was very special to me - a mentor, teacher, persuasive theorist and great architect.

My earliest memory of Wilson was his critical reaction to my initial sketch for the first-year project: a sculpture court. I was soon made to realise that I had drawn a superficial episode unsustained by any larger concept. This was the first lesson about architecture as a passionate, intellectual pursuit of ideas of which appearance and its aesthetic possibilities is an integral part, not a separate goal.

For Wilson, architecture was a vocation and the architect someone who must have a fundamental cultural and public obligation. That is one of his great legacies. He was formidably well read and was christened by his friend R.B. Kitaj, the painter, as "the 1922 kid", the year of Wilson's birth having also seen the publication of Joyce's Ulysses, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Eliot's The Waste Land. This discursive and philosophical background inspired a kind of self-knowledge and a complexity in his architecture quite distinct from the deliberate simplicity and reductionism of mainstream Modernism. He would quote Wittgenstein's "the meaning lies in the use" and was engaged by Eliot's proposition that everything new reinterprets how we see the past. Wilson's architecture was embedded in historical ideas.

Even in the early Sixties he was beginning to articulate a refutation of mainstream Modernism, which eventually took the form of a series of essays in The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture (1995) and a further group of essays in Architectural Reflections. These essays offered a deeply thoughtful way out of the phoney "style wars" of the Eighties and Nineties.

Wilson's architecture reflected his shift away from the Corbusian Modernism which he had practised in the LCC and which influenced his extension to the School of Architecture in Cambridge in 1958. (He had been flattered and amused by Corbusier's enigmatic comment on visiting the extension: "The intentions are clear"!)

But one of the major buildings of this period undertaken in Martin's office with Patrick Hodgkinson was a hostel for Caius College, Cambrige, an extraordinary brick acropolis in the form of a raised court surrounded by student rooms. The raised place was a theme that Alvar Aalto had distilled from his interpretations of Hellenic sites; it informed his famous and influential design for the village hall at Saynatsalo in Finland. For Wilson it became a generative idea in the composition of the Oxford University Law Library (1964) and eventually in the form of the British Library.

But the sense of "the other tradition" also emerged in smaller projects, such as the elegant student residential tower in the grounds of Peterhouse with its echelon of rooms clustered around a core of kitchens and stairs. Then there appeared the Cambridge studio for the artist Christopher Cornford, designed by Wilson with his wife M.J. Long. This little building of timber and brick astonished with its subtle volumetric complexity and easiness of composition. It had affinities with the work of American interpreters of the arts and crafts movement such as Bernard Maybeck and Greene and Greene.

Architectural practice is unpredictable and rarely consists of a constant flow of projects and income. The kind of very high-profile and politically sensitive projects which Wilson attracted through his association with Martin were inherently uncertain: the British Museum extension, Liverpool Civic Centre and the British Library. The British Museum project was successfully accomplished, Liverpool Civic Centre was abandoned and the Library became an epic struggle. Such projects have a fatality about them. The architect's inescapable personal and professional commitment may become limitless in time and effort.

Wilson wondered whether the life of the architect G.E. Street was cut short by the vicissitudes and stress of building the Law Courts in the Strand. But Wilson survived to enjoy not only critical acclaim for the British Library but also the appreciation of readers who love the building, a final and just conclusion of his "war".

The library has been described as Wilson's life-work. But, having decided against becoming a painter, he pursued a parallel course of collecting the work of post-war British artists who became his friends, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin, R.B. Kitaj and Eduardo Paolozzi among them. This was also a life-work and its happy conclusion was for Wilson to design and complete the building to house his collection in an extension to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

This was not without its vicissitudes; he had to compete as architect for the design because of National Lottery policy, even though the building was to house Wilson's gift of his own collection of some 400 artworks. Of course there was the usual resistance to planning consent, on the assumption that a new building would be an unsightly intrusion into the back streets of the historic town. In fact, the opposite is true; the scheme knits into the locality. This, then, is another great legacy which Wilson lived to see concluded, when the extension opened in July last year.

Integrity, intelligence, creativity, determination and humour finally prevailed. Sandy Wilson will be remembered with great admiration and affection.

Richard MacCormac