Some reasons for talking about Peter Wilson

Alluding to Peter Wilson’s book Some Reasons for Travelling to Italy (2016) and adopting its narrative device, this article invites a journey of discovery into Wilson’s own architectural universe. Listing idiosyncrasies of Wilson’s work and reasons for delving into its multi-layered nature, the article decodes conceptual, figurative, and tectonic references from which Wilson derived his architectural vocabulary. Scanning Wilson’s oeuvre requires traversing distant territories and intimate thresholds, looking simultaneously backwards and forwards, and moving through spatial practices of writing, drawing, and building, which together define its productive complexity. Accordingly, defying a chronological narrative, the article explores a series of built and speculative projects, drawings and installations, offering a transversal reading into accumulations of tropes and relations that underpin Wilson’s work. His categories ‘Appropriations’, ‘Juxtapositions’, ‘Narratives’, ‘Choreographies’, ‘Adjacencies’, ‘Artefacts’, ‘Objects’, ‘Fields’, ‘Material Assemblages’, and ‘Atmospheres’ offer a particular projective taxonomy. The article presents them as a collection of plays, each with a set of rules and its own micro-narrative; each with its own mask. Masks recur in Wilson’s work as both figurative and procedural frameworks embodying his concern with finding a role for the architectural object in the performance of everyday life. Uncovering these masks, the article argues that even though Wilson’s work has distinct evolutionary stages, they cannot be seen as a diachronic succession. They rather fold into each other in a process of constant deviation from their own rules, rejection of fashions, or revalorisation. Such a process of internal folding mirrors Wilson’s consistently provocative and experimental nature. It is one of the reasons why Wilson’s work retains a particular allure, calling for an exploration of its conceptual complexity as well as spatial sensibility, and awakening our imagination.


Shared subjectivity
'Peter Wilson. Born in the middle of [the twentieth] century. Early experience limited to suburban Australia except for a distant view of the pyramids at the age of five.' 1 With a distinctive tinge of irony, this biographical note accompanied the programme of Diploma Unit 1, which Wilson took over at the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London in 1981, having graduated from the same school in 1974. Not only does it project a richly suggestive image, but it simultaneously signals Wilson's culturally situated (or displaced) self and reflects his idea of 'shared subjectivity'. 2 This was effectively a method of operating with mediated memory, 'taking the privacy into the public realm', which defined Wilson's AA teaching agenda at the time and remained present in his subsequent architectural production. 3 Such a translation of the private internal nature of experience into public modes of appropriation and mediation was also employed as a narrative device in Wilson's book Some Reasons for Travelling to Italy (2016) more than three decades later. Far from being a conventional travelogue, this compact volume, conceived as a collection of episodes and densely populated with Wilson's drawings, decodes his (and others') cultivated interest in the Mediterranean country, echoing the vibrant legacy of the Grand Tour (Fig. 1). The book sheds light on Wilson's heroes and the heterogenous collection of cultural references that have shaped his architectural sensibility. Described as 'the product of cartographic imagination', it reveals, however, an unfamiliar topography of history, invested with unconventional meanings. 4 Using words and drawings, which act as devices of both registration and projection, Wilson articulates a nuanced understanding of places as an accumulation of unexpected spatiotemporal relations, unravelling rich and complex processes of 'rescripting' their atmosphere. 5 In its minute details and the myriad interpretations and readings included therein, the book reflects the power of Wilson's literary and pictorial imagination to skilfully envelope the reader in a cloudy continuum of facts and fictions, as well as personal and cultural memories. As such a mirroring medium, it also suggests that scanning Wilson's oeuvre requires traversing intimate thresholds and distant territories. It calls for looking simultaneously backwards and forwards, moving through spatial practices of writing, drawing, and building, which together define its productive complexity. Accordingly, adopting Wilson's narrative technique, the article takes the reader on a journey of discovery into Wilson's own architectural universe, listing reasons for delving into its multi-layered nature. As such, it offers a transversal reading into the accumulations of tropes and relations that underpin his work.

To bridge polarities
One could suggest that Wilson's work, like his native Australian landscape, is vast. With wide horizons, rich layers and textures of thoughts, it is inhabited by exotic 'specimens', such as the uncanny figural rainwater pipe crawling up the Blackburn House in Hampstead, London (1985London ( -1987, his first built project, executed in collaboration with Chassay Wright (Fig. 2) nowadays sadly stripped of all the peculiar details. The Münster City Library (1987-1993)undoubtedly a signature built project in his partnership with Julia Bolles (also an AA graduate)is full of hybrid creatures that, in their dual capacities as structure-furniture, were designed to carry both visitors' bodies and architectural elements (Fig. 3). An enigmatic black imprint on the façade a solidified shadow of a passing Ninja, as suggested by the architects (Fig. 4) defines the character of the Suzuki House in Tokyo (1990Tokyo ( -1993. 6 The compact concrete body of the house is stuffed with a playful interior and equipped with a protruding red window, two white earthquake-resistant legs, and a façade-mounted furniture crane. Despite their distant locations and differences in scale, these ambiguous 'creatures' all belong to a vast family of Wilson's 'architectonic animals' housed in an 'ark'to allude here to Alvin Boyarsky's evocative tropeadrift on the seas of his imagination. 7 Interestingly, as noted by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958), an influential reference mentioned by Dalibor Vesely during Wilson's fourth year of studies at the AA, the 'word vast reconciles contraries'. 8 The sense of linkage and the act of traversing are implicit in Wilson's projects, where the speculative re-engages with the everyday, and where the factual and the imaginary are surreptitiously equated in the process of (creative) replication and radical playfulness. Bridging dualities is both a conceptual and a physical device, setting the mind and the body in constant movement. In the conceptual act of bridging, Wilson ingeniously explores polarities, revealing a productive interplay between the physical and the ephemeral, presence and absence, the figurative and the abstract, rationalism and expressionism, the real and the virtual. But more importantly, bridging and traversing are actual spatial mechanismsparticularly important in Wilson's early work, which evolved into a whole series in the 1980s, culminating in the well-known Bridgebuildings and Ship-shape (1984). 9 Bridges and ships became figurative and tectonic references from which Wilson derived significant components of his architectural vocabulary. They are easily recognisable in the nautical details of the aforementioned Blackburn House (Fig. 5), and again in the volumes and spatial configuration of the Münster City Library. As Wilson pointed out, this building 'is made of a fleet of ships and half-ships, each with its own micro-narrative'. 10 Bridges and ships acted, indeed, as important conceptual devices for reformulating spatial orders, as well as patterns of occupation and relations with the city and the landscape, playing with the theatricality of movement. It is thus not a coincidence that in defining new landscapes and new urbanities Bolles + Wilson refer to 'scenographic urbanism' and 'choreographies'. 11 Like the hypnotic Australian horizon, Wilson's work links Earth and Sky, triggering the phenomenal presence of natural elements and processes. 'Obsessive involvement with water' was a condition that defined the spatial occupation of The Water House (1976), a speculative project that, as Wilson himself claims, grounded his approach to architecture. 12 Inspired by the eighteenth-century architecture parlante of Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Étienne-Louis Boullée and Jean-Jacques Lequeu, The Water House became a manifesto for both the communicative and phenomenological potential of architecture defined by a tension between readability and signification. Its aim was to reveal infinite spatial possibilities by 'demanding the involvement of the inhabitant through the need to establish a personal invention of meaning'. 13 In Wilson's works, infinity defines relationships and formsin the landscape and the paper-scape. The latter refers particularly to Wilson's soft-shaded early drawings which, under Japanese influences ('cloud and smoke technique'), refused clearly defined boundaries and were thus imbued with ambiguity and ephemerality. There is also a fascinating dialectic between the immensity of   the subject (the landscape) and the miniature drawings. The obsessive procedure of miniaturisation, a clear characteristic of Wilson's work, involves precision and a double immersion. It requires the author to be immersed in the work to render all nuances, slowly and carefully following a pencil's or a brush's behaviour as it plays out on the paper. But it also requires immersion from the viewer to unlock the internal logic and mediations. The slowness of the drawings' production prescribes a parallel slowness in their reading. One could suggest that the movement of the eye while wandering in astonishment through all the details depicted in Wilson's drawings is in itself a spatial practice. In this context, the aforementioned precision is not a precision of technique, but, as hinted by Wilson, a precision in representing an 'architectural sensibility'; 14 a sensibility that gives rise to a particular intimacy and engagement between the reader and these drawings, or the visitor and buildings by Bolles + Wilson.  In this intimate relationship, one also discovers that Wilson's drawings, like his buildings, are material assemblages. This iterates the illusion of an almost palpable envelopment and tactility of shadows in the early pencil drawings such as The Bird House of 1975 ( Fig. 6) and A Comfortable House (for Architectural Speculation) in the Metropolis of 1977. It extends to the cigarette paper used in the drawings for the Villa Auto series (1979) and Wilson's emblematic invented medium, shoe polish, which both change colouration over time, imbuing the drawing with its own life. Colours, textures, glossy surfaces, and even three-dimensional objects which pop up from the surface, add to the drawings' material and symbolic layering.

To construct scenarios
Concerned with the transformative power of experience, both lived and imagined, in Wilson's work drawing acts as a mnemonic device for coding perceptions and constructing new realities. For Wilson, Bachelard's phenomenological poetics could be extracted from habits and desires that play a key role in the social and intimate relationship between space and its occupants. However paradoxical it may appear, it is intimacy that brings us back to the notion of immensity, which is related to a 'pure being of pure imagination', in Bachelard's words. 15 Paraphrasing Bachelard, one can then suggest that Wilson's works 'are the by-products of [the] existentialism of the imagining being'. 16 Evoking the power of the imagination, a spare pair of wings hangs on the attic wall of The Bird House, as if they were there to let our imagination fly.
Without underestimating Wilson's fascination for the Italian Radical Architecture movement and his early interest in the work of Bernard Tschumi, it was Bachelard that led him to define 'The Poetics and Rituals of Existential Space' as a framework for Diploma Unit 1 in 1981-1982. 17 The aim of the brief was to translate the rituals of reading a place into rituals of place-makingan act of attentive 'looking' and 'existential anchoring' understood by Wilson as 'an appropriation and construction of ambiences and histories'. 18 The idea of appropriation is key to reading Wilson's work. It encompasses a creative appropriation of 'genetic' material embedded in culture and territory, as well as a physical appropriation understood as an act of occupation of places by both architectural objects and their inhabitants. Yet, it also refers to a creative mutability of Wilson's design protocols and processes, opening up to their re-conception, re-composing, and re-appropriation. Therefore, even though Wilson's work has distinct evolutionary stages, they cannot be seen as a diachronic succession. They rather fold into each other in a process of deviation from their own rules, rejection of fashions, and re-valorisation, allowing for constant re-working and re-scripting of ideas. Such a process of internal folding mirrors Wilson's consistently provocative and experimental nature. It is the way he constructs scenarios; scenarios for projects and scenarios that become devices of seduction.
As Wilson has stated on many occasions, as soon as his drawings densely covered in pencil shading started to proliferate at the AApromoted particularly by Dalibor Vesely and Mohsen Mostafavihe headed in the opposite direction. He started searching for exactitude, multiple projections, bright colours, as well as expressive textures and strokes. 19 Reacting against the semiotic and discursive explorations which prevailed at the AA then (with NATØ at the forefront), Wilson claimed that only physicalitythat is, the act of building and its useconstitutes narrative validity. 20 To prove this hypothesis, his Unit turned towards 'the study of architecture not as abstract manipulations but as material assemblage', translating discursive ventures not into tectonic solutions but 'tectonically refined figurations'. 21 Paradoxically, such corporeal forms and tectonics with their poetic function mirrored the elusiveness of perception. This was manifested in the tension between the exactitude of tectonic projection and the expressive depiction of the landscape as a smoky (sfumato) background in Wilson's Clandeboye series of 1984 and 1985 (Fig. 7).
The corporeality of form became also an antidote to the fleeting and instantaneous character of a then emerging technologically dominated world, but without opposing its meditative power. Inspired by Paul Virilio, Wilson's proposal for the 1988 Japan Architect Shinkenchiku Competition 'Comfort in the Metropolis', which was awarded the first prize by Toyo Ito, was conceived as a defensive shield (Fig. 8) that countered the ephemerality of the contemporary city celebrated by Ito's Tower of Winds in Yokohama (1986). 22 Interestingly, its internal structure, defined as a 'cone of minimum electronic interference', was later re-appropriated in The Tower of Moving Numbers on Rotterdam's Wilhelminapier (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996), which used electronic technology to make intangible data (time, temperature, world population) momentarily captured and visible (Fig. 9). 23 'Appropriations', 'Juxtapositions', 'Narratives', 'Figurations', 'Adjacencies', 'Artefacts', 'Objects', 'Fields', 'Material Assemblages', 'Atmospheres' are not simply 'a cumulative vocabulary of metaphors', as recognised by Wilson already in 1984. 24 They have become 'productive paradigms'modes of operation and perception, performative codes that together constitute a thematic pattern underpinning both Wilson's teaching agenda and design work. 25 This projective taxonomy can be seen as a collection of plays, each with a set of rules and its own micro-narrative, each with its own 'mask' (Fig. 10).

To uncover the mask
From the 1984 drawing of the Face of Liberty journeying across the Atlantic (Fig. 11), through the Münster City Library entrance portico (Fig. 12), to a   (Fig. 13), masks recur in Wilson's work as both figurative and procedural frameworks. 26 Regardless of whether they refer directly to theatrical iconography, or explore the Face/Façade/Interface relationship on a more conceptual level, masks embody Wilson's concern to find a role for the architectural object to play in the performance of everyday life.
Masks are powerful devices for trapping the observer in the realm of appearances. 27 They conceal in order to reveal. Following such a logic, the Paradise Bridge in Amsterdam (1986)belonging to the Bridge-buildings and Shipshape serieswhen open, exposes its own graffitied rear façade, a mask for the Paradiso Club (Fig. 14). In doing so, it reveals the multifaceted nature of contemporary culture. In its capacity as a bridge, it connects; yet, as a consequence of its rotation, it also highlights existing imbalances, contrasting physical, programmatic, and historical traits.
A mask with its formalised expression or imprinted 'persona', solidifies an idea, dragging the observer into a codified system of relations. However, it is simultaneously an ephemeral appearance. As I already noted, ephemerality defined the character of Wilson's proposal for the 1988 Japan Architect Shinkenchiku Competition 'Comfort in the Metropolis'. Epitomising a detachment from the electronically invaded contemporary city, it was in essence an inhabitable 'Mechanical Mask'an 'electronic shadow'parasitical to Toyo Ito's Tower of Winds. 28 Also in Japan, the façade of The Osaka Folly (1990)a mask without an interiorprovided 'a backdrop for performance' of shadows, reflections, and projections (Fig. 15). 29 Designed for the International Garden and Greenery Exhibition coordinated by Arata Isozaki, the pavilion played once again with polarities and ambiguities. As described by Wilson: 'The visitor is always passing through, and never quite in it. It stands on water, never quite on the earth. […] Its green is not quite natural'. 30 Masks also mobilise imaginary worlds. In ancient Greece, masks allowed actors to play more than one role. Similarly, the Bridgewatcher's House in Rotterdam (1993Rotterdam ( -1996 has three different facesyellow, black, and white (Fig. 16). Together with the uncanny triangular form of the building, they stage and enact the effect of a shifting presence, imbuing the object with an illusory dynamism relative to the observer's point of view and their point of arrival at the site.
Masks also emphasise the theatricality of projects by Bolles + Wilson, which are conceived as unfolding stage sets of immersive spatiality, similar to that of the Picturesque dream governed by ideas of character and sensation. As 'set-up fields of dramatic incidents, of dramatic moments'to use Wilson's wordsthey question the relations between effect, affect, and meaning. 31 Here character, which became a recurrent trope in Wilson's work, is not only allied to the specificity of expression (mask, face-façade) or the sense of place, but also to the sensory impressions and active engagement within the place, that is, its atmosphere.
Not surprisingly, in the Villa Auto catalogue (1980) that accompanied Wilson's early AA exhibition, masksactual and conceptualplayed a   32 Decoding the mask's significance in the Villa Auto series (1979-1980), Coates evoked Sebastiano Serlio, a disciple of Leon Battista Alberti known for his fertile imagination and innovative contribution to the theatre architecture of the Renaissance. Interestingly, Serlio used domestic models to define theatrical settings, questioning dominant power structures and social divisions. While the comic scene finds its analogy in private houses, the house of the noblemen provides a scenery for tragic events, and the satiric scene unfolds in a backdrop of rustic huts. In the Villa Auto series (also set in a pastoral context), comic and tragic masks embody operational and formal differences between the eighteenthcentury Classical villa (Powerscourt) and the twentieth-century villa (Villa Auto). The latter is conceived as two formally identical, yet essentially different, comic and tragic, pavilions. Connected by an auto-path, they define new rituals of occupation and question the logic of contemporary dwelling.
One could claim another connection between Serlio's and Wilson's work. In his treatise, Serlio not only presents the diversity of domestic forms, or what he  calls 'habitations', but also 'inventions for unusual situations' at times 'completely divorced from contemporary urban realities and expectations of commodity'. 33 As in his theatrical scenes, Serlio's houses are characters representing social orders (and conflicts)a noble Gentleman, a rich Citizen, a Peasant, or even the Tyrant Prince. There are also houses that differ from 'common custom', such as a house with four entrances, a house for music, and a house with walled secret gardens. 34 It seems that a series of Wilson's speculative projects, including the Australian Summer Pavilion for the Barbecue Ritual (1979), The House for the Kite Flier (1975), A House for any Fred Astaire (1976), The Comfortable House, The Water House, and The Bird House, could fit within a Serlian taxonomy. They are similarly 'defined by different criteria than one has been conditioned to associate with a house'. 35 As Wilson wrote in the ArtNet magazine in 1976, he was interested in: spaces whose uses are outside contemporary cultural precedents and whose use involves a questioning of the user's terms of reference. An architecture that is concerned with the expression and fulfilment of desires and values that are usually expedient in the face of existing systems and economics. 36 In other words, these are spaces that subvert their familiar functions and become masks, suggesting certain similarities with John Hejduk's Masques series. 37 Alluding to ceremonial masked entertainments particularly popular at sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European courts, Hejduk developed over the course of the 1980s a series of imaginary character-buildings (a family of forms) condensing histories, ambiguities, and contradictions of contemporary urban and rural living, fundamental human existence, as well as architectural practice. In Hejduk's architectural theatre, 'Masques' were provocativefigurative and narrativeconstructions with an evocative power. They were not solutions to problems, but architectural expressions of reflection on social and political conditions. As such, they unsettled familiar meanings, common expectations, and activated new modes of perception. Not unlike Hejduk and Serlio, with a tinge of irony, yet with sharp seriousness, Wilson's early works can also be seen as operational scenarios. As they question inherited contemporary values, social orders, cultural attitudes, myths, habits, and dominant powers, they provide not solutions but different views of modern dilemmas. 38 While both Serlio and Hejduk seem to be suggestive references for reading Wilson's projects, there is another work which Wilson himself recognises as a major, if momentary, influence on the Villa Auto series: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's recipe for 'divorced eggs', 39 included in his provocative Futurist Cookbook of 1932. 40 Just as Marinetti's recipes are based on de-composing and re-combining recognisable and often conflicting elements, Wilson's projects deliberately play with juxtapositions, disjunctions, and dualities. One finds a Palladian Villa, an eighteenth-century Irish mansion (Powerscourt), a mini-Acropolis, a glass pyramid, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel's ghost. All of them are suspended in seemingly infinite landscapes (Fig. 17), in dialectic tension, Moreover, in the same way that Marinetti's Cookbook aimed to question the Italian 'bourgeois' past, Wilson's Villa Auto rejected traditional urban modes of occupation, subverting perceptions and typologies. But this reference to Marinetti suggests another subliminal meaning. If Marinetti's Cookbookan antipasta treatiserefuses a certain Italian-ness, can Villa Auto be read as an exorcising mask to drive away the ghost of Wilson's Australian past represented by the omnipresence of the car?

To stage atmosphere
Marinetti's Cookbook was as much about cultural provocation as behavioural orchestration and sensual appreciation. It was about staging a culinary and social theatre. Similarly, Wilson's architecture provides a stage for action,  42 However, it became explicit in the Faccia a Faccia [Face to Face] installation in the Gallery Zona in Florence (1979), which translated the speculative narrative of the Villa Auto series into a spatial narrative articulated by two masks, two identical photos of a Florentine pavilion, and a life-sized graphite drawn column. Glimpsing through the mask (with an internal imprint of Wilson's face), the visitor would discover a reflection in the mirror/window embedded in the column, experiencing a restless oscillation and mutual reflection between the author and the observer (Fig. 18). 43 Mirrors and reflections define a threshold between the real and the imaginary, between perceptual modes and semiotic codes. Knowing Wilson's interest in Surrealism, one might be tempted to evoke the Surrealists' fascinations with the mirror, or Lacanian thoughts on specularised subjectivity and the constitution of the 'self'. 44 It might, however, be more suggestive to turn to the phenomenology of the mirror and regard it as a perceptual mechanism in the production of effects and signs. Within their performative nature, mirrors in Wilson's work embody what Umberto Eco defines as catoptric prostheses. Rather than bare objects to be looked at, they are viewing apparatuses themselves. 45 This is evident in Bolles + Wilson's installation Column to Door in the Van Rooy Gallery in Amsterdam (1982) (Fig. 19), in which, similar to the Face to Face exhibit, mirrors are seen as a 'material medium for the passage of information' and, thus, generators of the narrative. 46 The first Comfortable House of 1977a proposal for a partly submerged house-periscope in Covent Garden in London awarded fourth prize in the 1978 Japan Architect Shinkenchiku Competitionwas also conceived as a catoptric theatre. Mirrors were used here to defy both spatial logic and  Interestingly, Peter Cook, the competition judge, was searching for proposals that not only contained 'layerings of meanings', but could also 'augment them toward […] a space that can be enjoyed, an atmosphere that can be created'. 48 Wilson's project certainly responded to Cook's call for a '"theatre" of situations', but more importantly, as noted by Cook, it illustrated Wilson's 'readiness to build'. 49 With its implicit tactility, it announced Wilson's transition from a 'conceptualist' to a 'materializer'. 50 Interestingly, the words of another Futurist -Umberto Boccionimight be relevant here, as he insightfully pointed out that although atmosphere is culturally regarded as intangible, it 'is a materiality that exists between objects'. 51 Undoubtedly, Wilson also believed in material alchemy, emphasising atmosphere 'by using all the various effects which light, shadows, and streams of energy have on it'to borrow Boccioni's words. 52 Analogous to Boccioni's interest in the dynamism of form, movement, and light, in Wilson's projects reflective surfaces become tools for imbuing architecture with ambiguity and life. The dark bluish-green glazed brick façade of the WLV office building in Münster (1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996) was conceived as a sensitive interface, dissolving the mass of the building, recording light conditions and mirroring its context (Fig. 20). Generating such 'material incidents' (to use Wilson's words) is a means to create an atmosphere and mobilise the observer. As Wilson pointed out in his lecture at the AA in 1998, atmosphere defines the 'real magic of architecture', which 'no drawing, no simulation can communicate'. 53 The contemporary philosopher Gernot Böhme, who has written extensively on atmospheres, might be instructive here, defining 'magic' as 'conjuring, telekinesis, the triggering of effects through signs'. 54

To redefine the status of an object
Undoubtedly, Wilson's atmospheres emerged from, and at the same time contributed to, a particular ambience of the AA. A hybrid atmosphereeducational and ideologicalevocatively described by then Chairman Alvin Boyarsky in the interview entitled 'Ambience and Alchemy', published in The Architectural Review in 1983. 55 In the same issue, dedicated almost entirely to the AA for its 'intensity of exploration, innovation and sheer graphic style', 56 Peter Cook traced the AA's evolutionary timeline, identifying the beginning of the 1970s with 'the most creatively perspicacious' moment, described as 'scenographic'. It was precisely the time of Wilson's arrival to   57 But, as I already suggested, Wilson's atmospheres were not limited to the elusive, shaded, and blurred ambience of the drawing, often recognised as his signature, and associated with a certain AA mood, as Cook pointed out. A parallel atmospheric quality can be detected in the tangible reality of Wilson's exhibitions, before such atmospheric 'staging' was applied to the scale of the building and the city. Like the drawings themselves, the exhibitions were scenographic constructs that operated on multiple levels (Fig. 21). Not only were exhibitions important tools for shaping the AA culture, they also allowed ideas about building to be put into practice, marking the transition from the speculative to the operative. 58 To a considerable extent, exhibitions moved the attention from the content to its reception and the performance of making space. They were small-scale building experiments focused on the creation of the particular conditions for reading and inhabiting projects and ideas that were put on display (Fig. 22).
This was certainly the case of the 1984 'Living with Rust' exhibition in Ron Arad's 'One Off' shop in Covent Garden, where drawings were replaced by one of Wilson's hybrid creatureshalf wall/half tableof the ship-shape taxonomy (Fig. 23). 59 It was an installation conceived as a creative re-appropriation of found conditions. It acted as a phenomenological devicea kind of drawing machine augmenting and visualising the ongoing process of decay, and engulfing the visitor in the particular atmosphere of the basement room. This was the first mark of a new spatial sensibility in which speculative scenarios took on a physical presence, defined through materials and details, spatial articulation, the interplay of volumes, and material and immaterial effects. The narrative informed the object, marking the shift towards artefacts with (what Wilson would later define as) 'magnetic radiation'. 60 Since then, the status of the object has been at the centre of Wilson's work. Although within clearly defined boundaries, Wilson's architectural objects are expansive entities. They cannot be dissociated from their context, neither from the experiencing subject. Reflecting on their contradictory, internal nature, one could evoke Bruno Latour's definition of artefacts as 'things'that is, 'complex assemblies of contradictory issues'. 61 Latour suggests that things, as opposed to Modernist objects, bridge the social, symbolic, subjective, and lived with the material, real, objective, and factual. In addition, things call for interpreting design in 'the language of signs'. 62 Understood in such terms, design carries, among other aspects, an attention to detail and an attention to meaning. These are the unquestionable lineaments of Wilson's work and some of the reasons for delving into its multi-layered and, at times, contradictory nature. But they are not the only ones. Exploring Wilson's foundational oeuvre is a journey of discovery that remains perpetually surprising and fresh.