Sir Colin St John Wilson; architect of British Library
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Last Updated: 1:42am BST 16/05/2007Page 1 of 3
Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson, who died on Monday
aged 85, spent a large part of his career on the ill-fated
British Library project, which he described as his "30-year
war".
"Sandy" Wilson's original scheme for the British
Library, with the eminent architect Sir Leslie Martin,
involved the razing of a substantial area of Bloomsbury in
order to create an open piazza south of the British Museum.
The scheme was approved in 1964, then shelved in the face of
fierce local opposition, compounded by a campaign instigated
by the historian Hugh Thomas to retain the British Museum's
original round reading room by Panizzi.
After countless re-designs and alterations of the site
parameters, Bloomsbury was rejected as a location in the
mid-1970s. A larger, more awkward, site was bought next to
St Pancras station for the now much grander scheme for a
building which would unite the old museum library's holdings
with the national science and patent collections.
Martin retired from the project at this point, and
Wilson was allowed to continue without him. Though an open
competition would have been appropriate for a publicly
funded project on such a scale, it was felt to be an
unnecessary added delay.
In 1978 a design was approved by the then minister of
education and science, Shirley Williams; but the election of
Margaret Thatcher's government in 1979 brought with it cuts
in funding and confusion, as the project was passed from one
administrative body to another. Delays led to increasing
construction costs, and the original plan was reduced
considerably in size; only three of the seven great reading
rooms survived.
The project, and Wilson's reputation, suffered a
further blow when the Prince of Wales, who had approved the
plans and laid the foundation stone in 1982, six years later
compared the reading room to "the assembly hall of an
academy for secret police".
Gerald Kaufman described it as "a Babylonian ziggurat
seen through a funfair distorting mirror"; and David Mellor
cited the problem as being that the architect was "no bloody
good".
Wilson never succumbed to bitterness or self-pity in
the face of such assaults, commenting that "without a sense
of the absurd, one would go and jump in the river".
A series of technical problems - which lay outside
Wilson's responsibilities - in the early 1990s provided his
opponents with further ammunition. These began with the
discovery that the mobile shelving systems were unstable and
threw books to the floor when they were moved. It was then
found that the wrong paint had been specified for the 180
miles of steel shelving, which were already showing signs of
rusting - Wilson later described this as "a cruel, cruel
blow. Just when everything seemed to be coming together at
last, a cruel blow that need never have happened".
Worse was to follow, with the discovery of faults in
the electrical cabling and sprinkler systems, flooding
lavatories, disputes about the brickwork and the axing of
the Antony Gormley sculptures and RB Kitaj tapestries
planned for the foyer - a particularly harsh blow to Wilson,
who was always concerned to incorporate other arts into
architecture.
When the library was finally completed, critics were
appeased by the careful detailing of the dramatic soaring
entrance hall and the elegant, carefully lit reading rooms.
Furthermore, the speed with which books could be relayed
from the four two-acre basement storeys via eight miles of
conveyor belts to the reader's desk was recognised as a
major advantage over the two-day minimum wait for books in
the original reading room of the British Museum.
The uncompromisingly modern abstract brick exterior
remained controversial, reminiscent for some of a 1970s car
park or shopping centre rather than a grand public
institution. Wilson remained remarkably sanguine, quoting
Alvar Aalto's axiom that a building can be properly judged
only after several years of weathering, and recalling the
initial unpopularity of such monuments as St Paul's
Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament.
The asymmetrical design of the library resulted from
Wilson's deliberate decision to take an organic rather than
a classical approach to the brief, in the tradition of the
British Free School of Mackintosh and Butterfield, which he
cited as "one moment in the history of architecture when we
had an impact on the rest of the world, rather than simply
providing an elegant footnote to the European mainstream".
Colin Alexander St John Wilson was born on March 14
1922 at Cheltenham. His father became Bishop of Chelmsford
and was known as "the Bolshie Bishop" and "Red Rev" for his
Republican sympathies during the Spanish Civil War. The
Wilsons lived in Bishop's Court Palace, which had 40 rooms,
an orchard, a paddock, a chapel and a bell-tower, at the top
of which young Sandy had his room. After a miserable time at
nearby Felsted - his stammer made him an easy target for
bullies - he went to study architecture at Cambridge
University, exhibiting his paintings at Heffer's Gallery.
Wilson served as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval
Volunteer Reserve from 1942 to 1946 - he was turned down for
flying due to poor eyesight. He then travelled to Brussels,
where he fell in love with a woman who turned out to be a
spy, and to India, where he grew a beard and painted for two
years.
After flirting with the idea of taking up painting as
a career, Wilson returned to London to complete his
architectural training at the Bartlett School of
Architecture, and as an unhappy assistant in the office of
the classicist architect Verner Rees. He then joined the
London County Council housing department, where he worked on
housing with James Stirling and Alison and Peter Smithson
under Leslie Martin.
The prevailing spirit of Le Corbusier-inspired
idealism in the LCC informed the design of such buildings as
the 1954 pre-cast concrete Bentham Road flats in Hackney,
whose poor maintenance in subsequent years made them a
poignant symbol of the disillusionment later felt by that
generation of architects. Wilson commented that "we really
felt we were building a brave new world" but that they
"probably weren't the right people. We were very young, we
didn't have families, and certainly we were doctrinaire in
the way that young architects can sure as hell be. I think
it required a bit more maturity"
In 1955 Wilson moved to a private development company
where he worked as principal architect for a year before
moving to Cambridge to teach and set up practice with Leslie
Martin, who had been made Professor of Architecture at the
university.
Inspired by Aalto's humane modernism, Wilson and
Martin's designs included Harvey Court, the brick
residential building for Gonville and Caius College in
Cambridge (1961), the open court of which was raised to
first floor level, the ground floor forming a plinth
containing communal rooms and storage facilities. One critic
described it as a shotgun marriage between Le Corbusier and
Aalto, but the celebrated American architect Louis Kahn, on
being shown round it, patted the brick piers and said: "Gee,
that gives me courage."
Other eminent visitors to the Cambridge School of
Architecture at the time included Le Corbusier, Walter
Gropius, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Neutra and Michael
Graves.
Wilson enjoyed teaching and was instrumental in
recruiting such teachers as Colin Rowe and Richard Eisenmann
to the school, and organising lectures by artists such as
Richard Hamilton and Kitaj. He also took part in the
influential 1956 exhibition "This is Tomorrow" with the
Smithsons and Eduardo Paolozzi.
The Law, English and Statistical Libraries on Manor
Road, Oxford (1959-1964), also with Martin, unite to form
one composition and displayed a clever handling of space and
light, though the materials were thought by some
ill-considered. Wilson's own light grey stone house and
offices on Granchester Road, Cambridge (1961-1964) had a
Paolozzi sculpture as the centrepiece and elicited from a
neighbour the comment: "Just what is it a temple to?"
Other buildings of the time included the 1960 Holloway
Road campus layout in London, the William Stone Residential
Building, Peterhouse, in Trumpington Road, Cambridge
(1960-1964) and the Aalto-inspired Cornford House in the
city (1965-1969).
In order to appear a credible candidate for the
commission for the Liverpool Civic and Social Centre, Wilson
temporarily filled his otherwise empty office with
busy-looking students and borrowed a couple of typists. He
got the job, but it turned out to be a mixed blessing:
though the project was critically acclaimed and highly
influential, Liverpool council pulled out eight years later
in the face of fierce opposition, which labelled the
somewhat grandiose design "fascist". Also among Wilson's
many unrealised projects was the pioneering 1973 competition
entry for the Lucas Industries Corporation headquarters in
Birmingham.
With three large-scale projects looming - the
Liverpool Civic Centre, the extension to the British Museum
(which also fell through) and the British Library - Wilson
retired from teaching in 1969 and devoted himself full-time
to his practice, which by then included such architects as
Peter Carolin and Wilson's future wife, MJ Long, whom he had
met while lecturing at Yale.
Wilson returned to Cambridge in 1975 with the offer of
the chair. During his 14 years as Professor of Architecture
the school thrived; a humane and open-minded teacher
himself, he showed great skill in balancing the theoretical
and practical aspects of architecture.
During the 1980s Wilson designed a new library
building for Queen Mary College in London, and a small
children's library for the Bishop Wilson school at
Springfield, Essex, a memorial to his father. Most potential
clients, however, assumed the practice was overburdened by
work on the British Library and MJ Long was forced to set up
a practice in her own name.
Wilson was a member of the Arts Council's
architecture panel and of the council's "per cent for art"
campaign, which argued that a minimum proportion of every
building's budget should be spent on art. He was a trustee
of the Tate Gallery from 1974 until 1980 and of the National
Gallery from 1977 until 1980. He himself had an impressive
collection of art, which he donated to the Pallant House
Gallery, Chichester, last year.
Wilson received a number of awards and honours,
including honorary doctorates from Essex, Cambridge and
Sheffield universities. He was a visiting professor at
several universities, notably at Yale School of Architecture
in 2000. He was knighted in 1998.
Wilson was fond of wearing corduroy, and usually
appeared much more youthful than his years.
He married, in 1955, Muriel Lavender. The
marriage was dissolved in 1971 and the following year he
married, secondly, Mary Jane Long, with whom he had a son
and a daughter