Colin St John Wilson

Sir Colin Alexander St John ("Sandy") Wilson, FRIBA, RA, (14 March 1922 – 14 May 2007) was an English architect, lecturer and author. He spent over 30 years progressing the project to build a new British Library in London, originally planned to be built in Bloomsbury and now completed near Kings Cross. Early and private life Wilson was born in Cheltenham, the younger son of Henry Wilson, a Church of England clergyman who became Bishop of Chelmsford from 1929. His father was known as the "Red Bishop" as a result of his sympathy for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Wilson was educated at Felsted School, and he studied history and then architecture at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1940 to 1942, when he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He served as a lieutenant in a Communication Squadron of the Fleet Air Arm in Europe during the Second World War and then India. He was demobilised in 1946, he completed his studies under Sir Albert Richardson at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, graduating as an architect in 1949. Wilson married twice. First he married Muriel Lavender in 1955, but they were later divorced in 1971. In 1972, he married the American-born architect Mary Jane Long, a founding partner of Long & Kentish architects; together they had a son and a daughter. Long and Wilson often collaborated on design projects. Career After graduating, he worked at the London County Council architects department from 1950 to 1955, under the directorship of Sir Leslie Martin, alongside James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson, Alan Colquhoun, Peter Carter, and William Howell. His designs of this period include the Le Corbusier-inspired Bentham Road Estate, Hackney. Wilson was involved with the Independent Group of artists at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and he contributed to the seminal "This Is Tomorrow" exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. He worked for a development company for a year before becoming a lecturer in architecture at Cambridge University in 1956, where Martin had been appointed Professor of Architecture. Wilson met Finnish architect Alvar Aalto through Martin and this had a major impact on his following building. He was a Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, from 1962 to 1971. He retired from teaching in 1969 to concentrate on his architectural practice.