Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson RA: A Reminiscence

This comes as a personal memoir by one of his former students. 'Sandy' had a profound influence on my life, as for many others who were privileged to be his tutorial sheep in the early days. Like many at Cambridge, I had opted to read 'Architecture' under the Tripos arrangements, without knowing much, if anything, about what it was about; but I soon did. Attending his small tutorial groups while listening intently, one's visual attention often wandered to the pinboard behind his head, to which were appended sketches by Eduardo Paolozzi and, at that early stage, Victor Pasmore. There were quotations from James Joyce, as well as TS Eliot. In fact, this was a crash course in 20th century culture, no less. Architecture came in on the back of it, as a clever way of introducing the main subject.

Sandy's gift with people, especially the young, was one of remarkable insight into what makes different individuals tick. This was also the gift of a born teacher and invaluable, as it turned out, in the treacherous field of client persuasion. It was fortunate that Sandy's clients tended to be civic, academic and institutional, rather than purely commercial, who would have got short shrift. What must have helped him with clients must have been his fine sense of humour, and occasional and memorable tendency to laughter.

Last summer, I saw Sandy, and heard and discussed with him, on a small lake steamer in central Finland. The Alvar Aalto Foundation Symposium had the title 'Less and More' and one couldn't imagine a more fitting title for Sandy's opening discourse. Little did I realise as I followed him, bounding up the rocky granite approach to Alvar Aalto's Muuratsalo Experimental House (he arrived before all the other invited critics and architects in the party), that this was to be the last occasion. The address that he delivered at the Symposium, in Jyvaskyla was on the Other Tradition, updated. It could have had some of today's signature architects quaking in their Crocs. Fortunately perhaps, he was talking to the converted. Finland had adopted Sandy long ago.

He was, in his influence on three generations of Cambridge-bred architects, an intellectual driving force that had ramifications in the British architectural compound far wider than is recognised today. The British Library, to which he referred as his 'Thirty-years War', remains his triumph and his lasting memorial. It is praised by architectural critics and historians and, most importantly today, by readers and researchers at the British Library, for the superb quality of its working environment. The project became trapped in a protracted bureaucratic time frame and some critics claimed – unjustifiably - that it was essentially a design of the l970s. Probably, it remains Britain's last great public building. In Sandy's long career as an architect there were other landmark buildings, a number in collaboration with Sir Leslie Martin. Also important were three key 'manifesto' buildings: the twin houses at Grantchester Road, Cambridge (one of which formed his studio and office, and is now the home of the Wittgenstein Archive in Cambridge). The second was a truly groundbreaking house, for the painter Christopher Cornford, a volumetric tour de force completed with his future partner MJ Long. Before these came the iconic, cubic extension to the School of Architecture, Cambridge University, distinctly late Corbusian and 'Modulor'-based. And after all these - long after, as Wilson's swansong - came the Pallant House Gallery at Chichester, opened last year. The gallery fuses together most of his art collection with a building that contains not a little of Alvar Aalto, the Finnish master who was his ultimate mentor.

Through these key buildings, and his own theory publications,^1,2 Wilson not only influenced architectural thinking in the latter part of the 20th century, but he was also able to exemplify this philosophy through his own built works. He brought about a reappraisal of modern architecture in terms of a different tradition from that proffered by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. These two publications became academic and professional bestsellers. As a result, he was important in resetting the parameters of the postmodern period, for a continuing modernism, alive and well in the 21st century.

Sandy was also unusual, for an architect, in that his enquiring formulating intellect spread widely across literature and the visual arts. His best friends included Ron Kitaj. Eduardo Paolozzi, and Peter Blake. There could not have been a better architect member of the Royal Academy. He would have made a superb President of the Royal Academy. He remained an active member for many years. As Richard Wollheim said, 'Art is a form of externalisation, of making concrete the inner world.' His collecting of art typified this and began in the early post-war period out of his diminutive LCC income. Membership of the Independent Group in l950s London brought him closer to the leading new generation of artists, with James Stirling involved, as well as Robert Maxwell and Reyner Banham. As Sandy began driving from Cambridge to Liverpool to secure the Liverpool Civic Centre project in his not-so-new two-litre Bristol Sports Saloon, many were apprehensive. But he was as good a driver as he was a cricketer. He survived a 'roll' however, but less robustly, the building failed to materialise. It would have been a major addition to the centre of Liverpool.

Gradually, the British Library emerged to dominate Wilson's professional practice. There were visiting teaching posts at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but the Library gradually took over life. The private house for Christopher Cornford, carried through formative ideas. The British Library story remains an epic architectural saga and, for architects, a cautionary tale of the 20th century; the Herculean saga of how one man's determination was pitted against the shifting sands of government and bureaucracy. Any lesser individual would have been defeated, but Sandy prevailed against all the odds. Perhaps not as well known was the influence upon Sandy Wilson of the painter, historian and commentator Adrian Stokes. 'What is needed,' Stokes wrote, 'is an architecture to "fill the void", to enwrap us with tactile passages and transitions.' This was what Wilson provided, to the permanent delight and satisfaction of readers and users. For Wilson, as exemplified at the Pallant Gallery collection of his work (and that of others), paintings gave him a gentle respite from the conflict-ridden processes of realising a building on such a monumental scale as the British Library. Now they stand as his testament.

In Cambridge, his students could sit in the small tutorial room of the extension he had built and see along one wall the elevation of the emblematic Harvey Court student accommodation building, (actually drawn up by Alex Reid) whose presence today still resonates with what Stokes would confer to be centuries of architectural presence. Then, sitting there, one could realise the intellectual scope of architecture as a living, polemical component in a broader literary and visual modernity, a continuing process. This indeed was Wilson's special art.

Michael Spens

1. Wilson C. Architectural Reflections: Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
2. Wilson C. The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.