Curators from our Drawings and Archives team recently finished cataloguing the archive of Colin St John Wilson and Partners. Colin St John "Sandy" Wilson was a uniquely significant figure in post-war British architecture, combining a career as a leading architectural theorist and educator with the design of major public buildings. His practice is best known for the British Library, but the archive spans from Wilson’s earliest work for the London County Council in the early 1950s to his last commission, the extension to the Pallant House Gallery completed in 2006.
Please email drawingsandarchives@riba.org to find out more about the archive and how you can access it, or explore the Wilson Project blog for updates from the team.
One of the outcomes of the project was an enriched understanding of the work of MJ Long. Long came to work for the practice in 1965, and married Wilson in 1972. She was a talented architect who undertook critically well-received commissions in her own name, but her central role in the work of Colin St John Wilson and Partners has occasionally been obscured. Unpicking the contribution that MJ Long, and other partners, made to the design of the Wilson practice’s major commissions was a central theme of the project.
The archive contains 174 boxes of manuscript and correspondence material, 16 models, more than 23,000 drawings and 31 folders of photographs, as well as a substantial body of work related to Wilson’s theoretical writings. The project sorted, appraise and catalogued this extensive archive to produce a publicly searchable finding aid. Archival material was also rehoused and preserved permanently as part of the RIBA Collections, creating a significant research and educational resource.
The project was made possible thanks to a generous contribution from the late MJ Long. Find out more about how you can support our world-class collections.
