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shortlist for the Stirling Prize before winning in 2015, shows the success of its approach. Previous Stirling Prize shortlists have included Duggan Morris, Softroom and Peter Cook for the Kunsthaus in Graz designed with Colin Fournier. Cook has since set up practice with alumnus Gavin Robotham as CRAB Studio, which had notable success at the World Architecture Festival in 2014. After leaving The Bartlett, Moussavi took a different path. She went on to study at Harvard with Rem Koolhaas, then working at OMA before winning the Yokohama Ferry Terminal competition with Alejandro Zaera-Polo. It was with Zaera-Polo that Moussavi set up Foreign Office Architects; after its dissolution she founded Farshid Moussavi Architecture. FAT – an acronym of Fashion Architecture Taste – emerged from the intellectual maelstrom of The Bartlett in the early 1990s. Tutors Kevin Rhowbotham and Nic Clear curated an exhibition called Barbitecture, featuring Barbie dolls in various states of undress and dismemberment, suspended on thin cord in an intriguingly lit abandoned warehouse in the thenrundown district of Shoreditch. This challenged various conventions of subject matter, mode of presentation and location for architectural education and set the agenda for FAT. Shoreditch was being adopted as the favoured venue for studios by the young British architects who similarly played with familiar objects and codes of taste, and with whom FAT maintained various relationships. The early membership of FAT was fluid but eventually stabilised with two Bartlett graduates, Sam Jacob and Charles Holland, as partners alongside Sean Griffiths. Their polemics challenged and refreshed architectural thinking with the same sort of verve that the Young British Artists applied to art. Their built work includes The House for Essex, designed with artist Grayson Perry, who gave the first Donaldson Lecture in January 2016. In 1994 the shortlist for the Cardiff Bay Opera House stunned the architectural world. Not only was Zaha Hadid selected as the winner – although her scheme was later shelved in controversial circumstances – but among the last eight was a group of four Bartlett
COLIN ST JOHN WILSON 1922-2007
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on of a bishop, an officer in naval intelligence during the Second World War, noted art collector, architect of the British Library and professor of architecture at Cambridge 1975-89, ‘Sandy’ Wilson was also a student at the Bartlett from 1946 to ’49. It was not his first choice, his biographers Sarah Menin and Stephen Kite record; he would have preferred the Architectural Association’s ‘unremarkable teaching’ to Hector Corfiarto’s ‘dim classicism’. However Rudolf Wittkower’s lectures at the nearby Slade offset this with a rigorous and richer interpretation of Renaissance classicism that he published in the year of Wilson’s graduation as Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. Like a number of his contemporaries – Alison and Peter Smithson, Reyner Banham and James Stirling among them – Wilson appreciated how Wittkower gave architecture intellectual roots based on the relationship between proportion and Platonic thought. Another of their contemporaries, Colin Rowe, explained in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa how that could be traced in the work of Le Corbusier.
Despite graduating with a distinction, Wilson was, Menin and Kite note, ‘amazed that one could be passionate about [architecture]’. He was more enthused by – and showed promise in – painting, although he rejected the opportunity to take David Bomberg’s legendary Saturday morning drawing classes at the Slade because he thought them ‘too old fashioned’ and eventually realised he lacked the painter’s ‘necessity to explore an idea or issue’. His interest in painting evolved into friendships with, commissions for and purchases from artists such as Kitaj, Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and Michael Andrews. He, meanwhile, began his career as an architect. From low-key beginnings he moved to London County Council – a hotbed of radical architectural and social thought (although there was a split between those who promulgated each type of radicalism) – where his ultimate boss was Leslie Martin. A lectureship at Cambridge and partnership with Martin set his career firmly towards the professorship and British Library commission. Much of his art collection can be seen at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, whose extension designed with Long and Kentish was one of his last architectural works.
HARUKO TOMIOKA KRZESZOWIEC
JANET HALL / RIBA COLLECTIONS
BARTLETT STUDENT 1946-1949
(Far left) The British Library, London, by Sandy Wilson (Left) Farshid Moussavi (Opposite, top left) Abedian School of Architecture by CRAB Studio, 2014 (Opposite, top right) Alfriston School sports centre by Duggan Morris Architects, 2014 (Opposite) Kielder Belvedere by Softroom, 2009