Abstract/Summary

Alluding to Peter Wilson’s book Some Reasons for Travelling to Italy (2016) and adopting its narrative device, this article also invites a journey of discovery into Wilson’s own architectural universe this time. 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.