Portraits of a Practice: The Life and Work of MJ Long

Portraits of a Practice: The Life and Work of MJ Long

Friday 13 October – Saturday 9 December 2023 AA Gallery Architectural Association School of Architecture 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES

Portraits of a Practice: The Life and Work of MJ Long This exhibition explores the work of the architect MJ Long as revealed through a doll’s house she made in the late 1970s for her young daughter, Sal. This doll’s house offers an important yet unusual perspective on Long’s exceptional academic and professional life, during which she constantly negotiated the various labels that were applied to her – architect, mother, teacher, immigrant, (professional) partner, wife, woman – whether she identified with them or not.

MJ Long built Sal’s doll’s house on the floor of the living room in the home she shared with her husband and business partner Colin St John Wilson. Together they codesigned the British Library in London and, during a particularly fraught stage in the process, she chose to devote her limited free time to the painstaking construction of this structure, incorporating aspects of her childhood, academic interests and personal life to create this large timber object whose style is distinct from anything she made in practice.

This exhibition uses the doll’s house and its contents as a portal through which to examine Long’s different spaces of work and leisure. The exhibition presents photography; the voices of friends, family and colleagues; and contemporary reconstructions of lost work alongside original material from the RIBA Archives.

This allows us to delve into the context, references and influences that shaped Long’s practice. Perhaps the doll’s house, and the gendered complexities of family life and domesticity that it represents, can be read as an invitation to reconsider what constitutes work.

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MJ Long (1939–2018) Mary Jane Long was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1939.

She studied architecture at Yale School of Architecture, where she met Colin St John (Sandy) Wilson. She moved to the UK in 1965 to join his architecture practice and was principal architect partner during the 30-year creation of the British Library. The couple married in 1972. Long independently designed studios for artists including Peter Blake, RB Kitaj and Frank Auerbach, and published a book called Artists’ Studios in 2009 about the 14 studios she designed. She also worked on museums and galleries including the Jewish Museum in London and the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, in partnership with Rolfe Kentish, and created an extension to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester with Wilson. MJ Long was a lecturer at Yale for more than 40 years. She died in September 2018.

Exhibition Credits Curated by Elena Palacios Carral Exhibition Design: Forms of Living (Elena Palacios Carral with Isabella Synek Herd) Doll’s House Photography: Yushi Li Doll’s House Fabrication and Restoration: Isabella Synek Herd Graphic Design: AA Communications Studio Exhibition Realisation: AA Public Programme Exhibition Build: Commissioned by You and AA Facilities Video and Sound: AA Audio Visual Special Thanks to: AA Archives, British Library, Juliet Babinsky, Barbara Campbell-Lange, María Elena Carral, Michael Franke, Rolfe Kentish, Jon Lopez, Mario Palacios, RIBA (Lauren Alderton, Catriona Cornelius, Charles Hind, Lisa Nash, Alix Robinson), Josie Sommer, Sal Wilson.

House / Studio MJ Long’s home, which she referred to as her ‘house/ studio’, was a site of perpetual work. It was the home she shared with her family as well as the address of her independent practice, MJ Long Architects, whose projects included several artists’ studios – ‘house/studios’ in their own right. Additionally, it was where she continued work on projects in partnership with her husband at Colin St John Wilson and Partners, such as the British Library. The domestic and intellectual spheres of Long’s life overlapped in her house/studio, highlighting that the home is a space of work where domestic labour is rendered invisible, mirroring how Long was at times made invisible in her architectural work.

The contents of the doll’s house hint at the professional and personal stories behind Long’s extensive body of work. Archival materials, books and photographs reveal the influences that shaped Long’s life and suggest how these projects occupied space in both her home and her mind.

Domestic Space MJ Long shared her home in St John’s Wood, London with her partner Colin St John Wilson and their two children, Sal and Harry. While Long created the doll’s house for Sal, it was arguably also for herself. She spent long hours working on it, imbuing its miniature spaces with the references, ideas and issues she grappled with in her life and work.

Homes are shaped by social and political forces and by the distribution of work, wealth, gender and power. This section of the exhibition focuses on representations of domestic space and domestic labour within Long’s work and life. The exhibits signify larger structural systems that delineate and define familial roles, patriarchal structures and forms of work.

Partnership Office Alongside her own practice, MJ Long worked closely with her husband as a principal architect partner at Colin St John Wilson and Partners. The office became an extension of their home; the children visited regularly and were looked after while their parents worked.

This section of the exhibition features another doll’s house designed by Colin St John Wilson and Partners for a 1982 competition organised by Architectural Design magazine.

This doll’s house is similar in form and function to the one Long made for her daughter, and bears traces of her friendships and relationships with other significant architects at the time. Reuniting these two doll’s houses – one made at home and another made in the office – encourages us to question the parallels and distinctions between an architectural model and a doll’s house.

Exhibition Design The design of this exhibition features fragments assembled into three sections that correspond to MJ Long’s house/studio, her office at Colin St John Wilson and Partners, and her domestic space. These divisions are made in dialogue with the Georgian domestic architecture of the AA Gallery, but they do not intend to establish rigid boundaries or reinforce the hierarchies inherent in different spaces of work.

Instead, the purpose of the design is to emphasise the overlaps between these spaces and their use, while unveiling the layers within them that otherwise remain hidden. These layers encompass everything from the repeated arches visible in both doll’s houses and the architecture of Long’s home, to her children’s scribbles on the back of a letter she was drafting to the artist RB Kitaj.

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Fragments 1–7

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Fragment 1: Oblique Wall This fragment is placed at an oblique angle to the space and negotiates MJ Long’s different spaces of work, drawing together the architectures of her house/studio where her personal practice was registered, and the office she shared with her husband at Colin St John Wilson and Partners.

Fragment 2: St Jerome / Invigilator Desk This alcove space designed for the exhibition invigilator is inspired by a drawing of St Jerome in his study that was influential for MJ Long. In the drawing, St Jerome is contained within an arched space of work that sits inside a larger domestic architecture. Throughout her career, MJ Long was interested in negotiating the conditions of work and production – from the design of the British Library and various artists’ studios (including her own) to the making of doll’s houses where she could test ideas and play. Long’s interest in the spatial conditions of work was present since she was a student at Yale and can be seen here in a design for a monastery from her student portfolio.

Fragment 3: Fireplace Here, a fireplace in the AA Gallery is partially hidden behind a plywood structure, representing the tension between MJ Long’s spaces of work and the blurred boundaries between her private and public lives.

Exhibits in this area include sketches created by MJ Long for both doll’s houses. The sketches for Sal’s doll’s house appear informal and rough, without extensive notations, suggesting that they were intended solely for Long’s personal use. By contrast, those for the AD doll’s house are polished and professional with extensive notes on whether the colour of the house’s finish should be pink or red; the pink hue resembles the colours used

in Sal’s dollhouse. Also included are working drawings produced for the making of the AD doll’s house, both for its original incarnation and for its reconstruction for this exhibition.

Fragment 4: Oblique Wall with Arch This fragment is also placed obliquely within the gallery space. It draws inspiration from a recurring arch motif that appears in MJ Long’s architectural designs and her doll’s houses. This motif can also be found in Long’s refurbishment of her house/studio, notably in the kitchen, which is depicted here in photographs by Michael Franke. The kitchen contained a drawing board where Long worked on her designs. This fragment therefore highlights how the kitchen functioned both as a studio and a key domestic space.

Fragment 5: Fireplace Half of one of the fireplaces in the AA Gallery is hidden by this fragment, while the other half is revealed.

This intervention creates a shelf that holds some of the objects and furnishings from Sal’s doll’s house, such as the beds and sofas, as well as photographs by Yushi Li of some of the individual rooms in the doll’s house. These provide normalised representations of domesticity and the home.

Fragment 6: Tower This fragment represents the top of a tower at 1:1 scale.

MJ Long was fascinated with these structures, and once said that she would love to live at the top of a tower.

Towers appear in many of Long’s drawings and models, including in Sal’s dolls’ house, where a tower rises from the roof of the villa.

Fragment 7: Shelf This fragment displays one of the presentation boards that was produced for Colin St John Wilson and Partners’ entry into the Architectural Design (AD) Doll’s House competition. These sit alongside the copy of AD magazine in which a selection of entries to the competition were published.

Doll’s House Objects The objects in Sal’s doll’s house tell stories about MJ Long’s personal and professional life, and the lives of her family. For example, the dolls themselves were named after the children of architect James Stirling, who was a close family friend. The objects are drawn from disparate sources, combining shop-bought doll’s house furniture with bespoke creations, an East German rocking horse, Indian pots and pans, and so on, showing the range of contexts and cultures that Long was referring to. The paintings are miniature recreations of works in Long’s personal collection, by artists such as Peter Blake, Howard Hodgkin and RB Kitaj. The original paintings can now be seen at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, to which Long and Wilson donated more than 400 pieces of modern and contemporary British art. In this exhibition, Sal’s doll’s house is not displayed with its contents. Instead, these objects are dispersed throughout the exhibition to create new conversations and adjacencies with materials drawn from her archive.

Sal’s Doll’s House This doll’s house was designed and made by MJ Long in the late 1970s for her daughter Sal. It was modelled on a villa in New Haven, Connecticut on a street called Hillhouse Avenue close to Long’s alma mater, Yale University. The villa was designed by the early-19thcentury architect Henry Austin, and Long’s fascination with this building can be traced back to her formative years at Yale where she began her training as an architect. While Sal was the ‘client’ for this doll’s house, many references, objects and stories within the project suggest it was more an object for Long herself. The doll’s house was put up for auction in 2020 by Sworders Fine Art Auctioneers. It was purchased by Elena Palacios Carral that same year, and became the catalyst for this exhibition and the wider research project it sits within.

AD Doll’s House This doll’s house is a reconstruction of one designed

by MJ Long in 1982 as part of Colin St John Wilson and Partners’ entry to a competition organised by Andreas Papadakis, the editor of Architectural Design (AD) magazine. It received third prize. The AD doll’s houses were auctioned for charity in 1983 at Sotheby’s, but the current whereabouts of this particular doll’s house are unknown. For this exhibition, Isabella Synek Herd has created a replica from archived drawings, photographs and sketches of the original design. She received guidance from Rolfe Kentish, who was involved in the construction of the original. Kentish was a collaborator of MJ Long’s, and later a partner in practice as Long and Kentish Architects. The replica was constructed in the AA’s workshops and matches the finishes, mechanisms and dimensions of the original as closely as possible, while also making use of updated digital technologies such as laser cutting and CNC.

Yushi Li, Polaroids, 2023 This series of polaroids by artist and photographer Yushi Li captures the different figures, objects and furnishings within Sal’s doll’s house. The objects exhibit both a childlike innocence and a sense of the problematic hierarchies embedded in domestic space, which they replicate in miniature. These images exist in dialogue with the different objects and drawings on display, as well as with larger images by Li of the furnished doll’s house that play with the gendered nature of these spaces. This is typical of Li’s work, which challenges the traditional and historically dominant male gaze by exploring female desire and creative expression.