An Architecture of Invitation

Colin St John Wilson

Sarah Menin, Stephen Kite

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138312951
• eBook ISBN: 9780429856129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2005, 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 the work – an oeuvre whose experiential depth is recognised by both users and critics.

1
Framing a life

The first aedicule

A large table stood in the Wilson family house. It offered a potential haven for Colin St John Wilson in his childhood, providing a place of safety and enclosure that was also open to the bewildering world around. This was Wilson's first experience of the 'aedicule' - what he would later describe as that "miniature shelter or canopy that creates a personal domain ... a space within a space ... an enclosure whose outside is still inside ... giving rise to a play between an inside-outside and the real outside'.¹ This first memory of mediated enclosure is key to Wilson's subsequent reflections on, and realizations of, architecture. Whether this recollection is of a table in the substantial vicarage in Cheltenham where the family lived until 1929, when he was 7, or the one in Bishopscourt in Chelmsford where they resided thereafter is less important than the psychological and metaphoric loading of this aedicule.

Our study is concerned to explore the fertile interactions between Wilson's life, architecture and thinking and their outcome in work of an unusually rich symbolic and experiential content. It is therefore necessary to explore the key aspects of the background of this complex personality: his experience of family life, school years and university; his war experiences; and finally his decision to become an architect.

Consciences and Celtic blood

Wilson's father, Henry Wilson, was born in the highlands of Scotland in 1876. Henry's father (Thomas Alexander Wilson) was 'a fanatical Conservative' from Glasgow,² and his mother (Mary, née Proctor) was a devout Anglican from Ulster.³ Henry Wilson always remained proud of this Celtic blood, and indeed the Episcopalian churchmanship that went with it.⁴ Thomas Alexander Wilson was a cloth merchant - 'remote and terrifying, never appearing to take the least interest in his children';⁵ Mary, however, was a devoted mother,⁶ and no fewer than three of her surviving four sons became Church of England clergymen. After the family moved from Glasgow to London, Henry's ambition to go to Dulwich College was typically 'thwarted' by his father; instead he was educated locally in Camberwell.⁷ Later, his mother and brother, Willie, pooled their small savings to ensure that he could go up to Cambridge, despite his father's refusal of support. Henry took a low Honours degree at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1898; a year later his mother died just as he was ordained curate. The family broke up when the father made a quick remarriage - an insult, they believed, to their mother's memory. Henry never saw him again - and never spoke to his own children of his father's new extended family - yet when Thomas Wilson died, Henry (then a vicar) was seen 'pacing the lawn in some mental torment'.⁸ His sorrow indicates the extent to which he was tormented by his poor relationship with his cold father; nevertheless, he could write of his childhood as 'so homely and uneventful that there is nothing in the story worth serious attention'.⁹

1.1 Wilson, portrait of his father, Henry Wilson, c. 1942, oil

Henry was assigned to Christ Church, Hampstead, where he met his future wife, Dorothy Mary Marston Daniels. They married in 1905; their first child, Josephine Lesley, was born in 1906, followed by Peter Humphrey in 1908.¹⁰ In 1913 Dorothy had a second son, Roger, who died in 1918, whereupon the couple sought a 'substitute son',¹¹ conceiving Philippa in 1919 and finally Colin Alexander - known as Sandy in 1922. Henry Wilson held physical prowess in high regard, both for himself and his sons: he was both cricket captain and tennis champion at school,'well set in his limbs and nimble'.¹² He had pale, very clear-cut features, and a pronounced, 'though not excessive' nose, according to his son, Peter, and was nicknamed 'Dicky-Bird' at Cambridge. Throughout his life women fell for him, from schoolgirls to the elderly (see Figure 1.1).

Vicarious upbringings

The Reverend Henry Albert Wilson became vicar of St Peter's, Norbiton, in Surrey, on marrying, and in 1915 moved to Cheltenham where his 'outspoken leadership was important',¹³ not least as Chairman of the evangelical Cheltenham Conference.¹⁴ He rose quickly through the ranks of the Church, and was consecrated Bishop of Chelmsford in 1929, a seat he held until 1950.

Henry always lamented what he saw as his abandonment of classical scholarship, and for years sought to recoup the 'disaster' of getting a low degree by striving to obtain a Doctorate in Divinity. Although his first book, Episcopacy and Unity, was accepted by Cambridge University as a Doctor of Divinity thesis, he could not afford the degree fee of £50 because of Dorothys serious illness at the time (1911-12). The book was later accepted by Trinity College Dublin for an Honorary Doctorate. Thereafter Henry became an avid writer on theological matters,¹⁵ including one volume called Letters to Timothy, which Sandy believed was directed to him personally, noting, 'I'm sure I was a communist or something that week.'¹⁶

Bishop Wilson's churchmanship has been described as 'conservative Evangelical with a liberal Anglican spirit'.¹⁷ He was 'a fearless speaker',¹⁸ but with the manner and approach of the humble, 'almost homespun warm-hearted highlander'.¹⁹ His'catholic' capacity for encouraging and accepting many approaches within the Church anticipates his son's years as Professor at Cambridge; this catholicity is also evident in the Bishop's interest in education. A project close to his heart was the establishment in 1936 of a new public school for girls, St Monica's, at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, where he became chaplain. It was in memory of his work to establish St Monica's that, fifty years later, the Bishop Wilson Memorial Library was built in Chelmsford, designed by his son.

Dorothy once remarked that she could not understand 'how the Good Lord had seen fit to yoke together two such different creatures as man and woman', as herself and her husband.²⁰ Although there was 'plenty of argument',²¹ Bishop Wilson was completely devoted to, and perhaps even completely dependent on, his wife. On the very rare occasions when she was absent, 'he would wander disconsolately about the house, muttering "I hate to have your mother away from home"'.²²

Standing alone: independence of mind

The Archbishop of Canterbury had warned Henry, 'Never be afraid to stand alone, and to say what you think';²³ there was no danger of him disappointing in this respect. Publicly, Bishop Wilson stood for distinctive, often unpopular, views; indeed he recognized that his'independence of mind' did not make for a good committee-man'; it created a 'a peculiar mental conflict'.²⁴ In Reflections of a Back Bench Bishop he described how he courted controversy by speaking out about world affairs,²⁵ especially the use of the atom bomb.²⁶ His presidency of the Council for Anglo-Soviet Unity attracted a telegram from Stalin,²⁷ and earned him the sobriquets 'the Bolshy Bishop' and 'the Red Reverend',²⁸ titles that 'rebounded on the luckless but not undefended head' of Sandy, then fifteen, at public school at Felsted.²⁹ Interestingly, Sandy Wilson's daughter, Sal, suffered a similar buffeting during the controversy surrounding Prince Charles's scathing comments about the British Library design in the late 1980s.³⁰ There is a common pattern in father and son here; a capacity to attract controversy, stimulate misunderstanding and create opposition - characterized by the son as the 'art of making enemies'.³¹

Enigmatic mothering: insecurity with variations

Dorothy Mary Marston Daniels was born on 1 April 1883, in Primrose Hill, London, the eldest child of George Walter Daniels (a cloth merchant like her future husband's father) and Mary Marston. Having failed to go up to Oxford, Walter developed a deep-seated prejudice against the 'Oxbridge' male; Henry Wilson was to suffer contempt on this count. Walter lavished affection on his daughters, but bullied his sons mercilessly, making one - 'Uncle Geoff' - incapable of functioning as an independent adult.³² Whether or not Dorothy was personally subjected to her father's cruelty, she probably witnessed the physical brutality and incessant disparagement suffered by her brothers. Peter St John Wilson recalls behaviour in her amounting to a certain mental instability.³³

Crucially, Dorothy's mother, Mary Marston Daniels, was a warm, gentle woman from a literary background. Mary's father, Edward Marston, was a leading publisher of the time, who enjoyed the company of many literary friends, including Thomas Hardy and Henry M. Stanley.³⁴ Sandy Wilson recalls a carved box in his grandmother's sitting room that Stanley had brought back from an African expedition for her.³⁵ Mary Marston Daniels translated, under the nom de plume 'Marie de Hauteville', several of Jules Verne's novels which were published by her father; later she ensured that her grandchildren had a 'good' French accent by teaching them French nursery rhymes.

Quirky neglect

Dorothy herself was something of 'an enigma - with variations'³⁶ - to those who knew her. She was attractive, and apparently physically strong, an accomplished musician and a lover of art. With her confident public 'persona', and an excellent memory for names and faces, she made an admirable wife for a public man. Peter recalls his father's 'impressive perso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: the examined life
• 1 Framing a life
• 2 London: building the 'new world'
• 3 Wall and court: the Cambridge years
• 4 The 'carving' of space: Cornford House
• 5 Shaping the polis
• 6 Master builder: the British Library
• 7 Architecture and art
• 8 A time to profess: return to Cambridge
• 9 An ethical line: ethics and aesthetics
• Conclusion: the aedicular offering – ordering the in-between
• Chronology of buildings, projects and competitions
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index