St sandy the humanist.

AN ARCHITECTURE OF INVITATION: COLIN ST JOHN WILSON 

By Sarah Menin and Stephen Kite. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2005. [pounds sterling]60

Working as a practitioner, teacher, writer, researcher and critic, Sandy Wilson has been influential in shaping the way many of us think about architecture. This book maps his career from formative moments in aedicular spaces under the table as a child in a Cheltenham vicarage through subsequent conversations with artists, a prince and an international coterie of professional colleagues, friends, and politicians, to decisions at the drawing board, faculty meeting and building site. In highlighting these various events, the book also confirms the major impact of his long and influential association with the school of architecture at Cambridge.

The development of Wilson's work, first inspired by Le Corbusier and subsequently by the Nordic modernism of Asplund, Lewerentz and especially Aalto, is analysed and the impact of ideas from aesthete Adrian Stokes and the English Free School traced alongside the rigorous rationalism of Leslie Martin. North America continues to be a significant influence too though while Louis Kahn is mentioned here, albeit somewhat anecdotally, Wright remains surprisingly invisible, Moore is acknowledged only briefly and Venturi dismissed as 'the smell of Hollywood'.

Tougher editing would have helped--do we really need to know that HMS King Arthur was a former Butlins Holiday Camp, Kahn played the piano magically in California or R. J. Kitaj had difficulties getting a satisfactory likeness of M. J. Long? The book would also benefit from additional architectural information. Drawings are often intricate, difficult to read and rather casually presented. Larger drawings and details tracking the development of projects, influential competition schemes and recent designs, would help illuminate the words and the formulation of ideas.

The book defines the inspiration, commitment and tenacity of this particular architect and thinker. It also highlights the difficulties of building a significant practice and a school of architecture simultaneously. But perhaps most importantly it projects a humanist view of architecture and the city that is in sharp contrast to current preoccupations with the construction of emphatic landmarks and privatised worlds.

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