Auto portraits and the enigmas of self: geometries of distraction and detection in the work of Peter Wilson

Abstract

Peter Wilson’s early work from the late 1970s is unusual for its focus on representations of the self. This evolved through a positioning of his work in relation to: his colleagues at the Architectural Association School of Architecture such as Nigel Coates and Bernard Tschumi; the Austrian artist Walter Pichler; and more historic references including Jean-Jacques Lequeu and the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. Responding to Wilson’s characterisation of the Villa Auto projects as ‘type noire’, this article interrogates his drawings in a forensic manner drawing on Ernst Bloch’s ‘A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel’ and Paul Auster’s City of Glass. By doing so, it uncovers how, through a series clues, traces, and red herrings, Wilson situates his persona into his work as he develops his own distinctive architectural language.