ABSTRACT
The family dwelling that Colin St John Wilson and M. J. Long created between 1965 and 1967 for Christopher Cornford is a small but central building in Wilson's oeuvre. At Cornford House, the spatial archetype that draws together these strands of place, meaning and multiple influences into an intense interweaving of opposites is the four-column primitive hut, or the little house of the aedicule. Cornford House is an important outpost in the 1960s quest for more intricate, identillable patternings of place. A key requirement in Christopher Cornford's thoughtfully typed brief for his home was for it to function psychologically; he wanted balance: 'balance between privacy and communication; between enclosure and exposure; and high walls for the display of paintings'. Crucial to the issues of psychologized space explored Adrian Stokes's mapping of the carving-modelling theories of artistic process onto the psychoanalytical object-relations theories developed by Melanie Klein in her work on infantile development.
