ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the fertile interactions between Colin St John Wilson's life, architecture and thinking and their outcome in work of an unusually rich symbolic and experiential content. In Wilson's imagination the place Peter inhabited at Bishopscourt - an octagonal, glazed turret room with stone-mullioned windows - merged with the learned contents of that place. This tower bedroom was lined with books and gramophone records, and gave Sandy his second experience of an aedicule, a place that within its gesture of physical enclosure also offered a source of wisdom and an invitation into the life of the mind. One such person was David Aberdeen: towards the end of Wilson's period at the Bartlett he lectured about his winning entry for the Trades Union Congress headquarters, and bewildered Wilson by declaring, 'I'm crazy about architecture.' Wilson continued to paint during the Bartlett period, including a canvas of the head of Christ.
