Introduction: architectural lineaments — adventures through the work of Peter Wilson

This special issue of The Journal of Architecture has its beginnings in a symposium that was organised jointly by Drawing Matter and the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and held in Edinburgh between 9 and 10 April 2018. Recent accessions to the Drawing Matter collection had included drawings and sketchbooks by Peter Wilson, such as his 1998 Eurolandschaft — A Dérive, drawn in a Japanese concertina sketchbook, and it seemed an opportune time to linger with his work. The aimwas to take a long view, revisiting the drawings, texts, and projects in order to explore continuities and transformations across them, and to examine, with a new closeness of attention, their force and consequence. Considerations thus spanned from Wilson’s early speculative projects through those developed during his longstanding collaboration with Julia Bolles, which started in 1980 and that led, with the award of the competition for the New City Library in Münster in 1987, to the establishment of what would in due course become known as Bolles +Wilson, as the practice continues to be called. While the symposium — and this is reflected in this special issue — was especially interested in questions of drawing, it was so in their connection to architectural thinking and the way that graphic techniques inform and shape processes of design. The intention throughout was to reflect upon the interrelationship between Wilson’s drawings and writings, and the designs that he has developed both individually and collaboratively. Born in Australia, Wilson studied at the University of Melbourne before travelling to London in 1971 to join the Architectural Association (AA), which he entered the following year — a period explored in the first part of the extended interview printed in this issue. Although the school was in a precarious state, in the grip of a funding crisis that had threatened its independent status, this was, at the same time, a significant moment of transformation that released great energy. Wilson’s arrival in London had coincided with the appointment of Alvin Boyarsky — whose celebrated unit system was introduced at the start of Wilson’s second year at the school — to the newly established role of AA chair. Studying with