An Architecture of Invitation: Colin St John Wilson
- Artist: Colin St John Wilson
- Published: 2005
- Publisher: Ashgate, Aldershot
- Edition: First
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 25 cms
- Pages: 360
- Illustrations: 249 b&w
£60.00£49.95
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An Architecture of Invitation: Colin St John Wilson is a distinctive study of the life and architectural career of one of the most significant makers, theorists and teachers of architecture to have emerged in England in the second half of the twentieth century. Exceptionally in an architectural study, this book interweaves biography, critical analysis of the projects, and theory, in its aims of explicating the richness of Wilson's body of work, thought and teaching. Drawing on the specialisms of its authors, it also examines the creative and psychological impulses that have informed the making of this work – an oeuvre whose experiential depth is recognized by both users and critics.
Wilson's work seeks an order that is not self-contained but is rather open to site, to light, to human touch, and to circumstance: for him this demands an ethical choice between the rival claims of Art and Life. Thus his work might be characterized as an architecture of invitation, predicated on the notion of architecture as a Practical Art, whereby form is born out of a process of painstakingly searching out the particular and psychological needs of the user. The ethic identified in the book takes Wilson beyond technocratic obsessions or transient pre-occupations with style, towards a more radical agenda than many would recognize. This is evidenced in Wilson's concern to address both the 'inner' (the psyche, physiological needs, and patterns of use) and the 'outer' (the humanist polis) in his architecture. Such agendas are timely and throw a significant challenge to the pervasive individualism of the object-city of 'landmark' architecture.
SIR COLIN ST JOHN WILSON WAS THE ARCHITECT OF THE NEW EXTENSION TO PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY
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Artists Biography
(b Cheltenham, 14 March 1922). English architect, teacher and writer. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge (MA 1942), and then, after service in World War II, he studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of London (1946–9). In 1950 he joined the London County Council Architects’ Department, where he worked in the Housing Division, first under Robert Matthew and then under Leslie Martin; at this time the LCC was among the pioneers of responsible, modernist public authority housing under the impetus of post-war enthusiasm for the Welfare State. Wilson left the LCC in 1955 to take up a lectureship at the School of Architecture, University of Cambridge, and he set up in private practice there. He designed the influential exhibition This is Tomorrow (1956), staged at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the other participants including Alison and Peter Smithson, members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, of which Wilson was also a member. He also designed several distinguished small houses in and around Cambridge, for example two houses (1961–4) in Grantchester Road and the Cornford House (1965–9), Madingley Road, the brick and timber construction of which is a variation of the vernacular.
