M J Long
Architect who jointly designed the British Library, one of the youngest buildings to be Grade I-listed
MARY JANE LONG, who has died aged 79, designed the British Library in London in partnership with her husband, Sir Colin St John Wilson. The commission for what would prove one of the most complex and protracted architectural projects of the century was awarded to Wilson’s office in 1962, at which point the library was set to occupy land opposite the British Museum. Joining the practice three years later, MJ Long, as she was known, played a leading role in coordinating the escalating requirements of a large client body, which ultimately saw the demand for space more than double.
Concurrently, the local authority was growing anxious about the scale of demolition that the project would entail. After more than a decade of design development, the client was finally forced to acknowledge that the project was too big for its site and, in 1974, presented Wilson’s office with a less constrained plot adjacent to St Pancras Station.
Faced with the prospect of developing an entirely new design, Wilson and three of his partners each spent a fortnight working up alternative ways of organising the building. Long’s proposal to divide it into two wings – one devoted to humanities and one to sciences, with shared facilities in between – was judged the winner.
Its realisation was dogged by delays, cost overruns – and the Prince of Wales, who dubbed the building an “academy for secret police” – but on its opening in 1999, the British Library proved immensely popular with readers. Just 16 years later, it became one of the youngest buildings to be awarded Grade I-listed protection.
Born in Summit, New Jersey on July 31 1939, MJ Long studied at Smith College, Massachusetts, before completing a degree in Architecture at Yale, where Wilson was one of her tutors. A star student, she won a travel scholarship in her final year which enabled her to visit the work of European modern masters such as Jan Duiker in Holland and Alvar Aalto in Finland before finding her way to Cambridge, where Wilson’s office operated from a house that he shared, increasingly unhappily, with his first wife, Muriel. Following the break up of that marriage, Wilson and MJ Long married in 1972 and started a family two years later, at which point he was 52 and she 35.
Besides architecture, their other great shared passion was the assembly of an extraordinary collection of contemporary art, which they ultimately gifted to the nation. It is now housed in an extension to Pallant House in Chichester, a 2007 building of their own design. One of the collection’s highlights is The Architects, RB Kitaj’s 1981 portrait of the Wilson family in which MJ Long is depicted at her drawing board, resplendent in an American football jersey. The setting is Kitaj’s recently completed studio, which he had invited Long to design. Further commissions for studios followed from artists including Gordon House and Peter Blake, enabling MJ Long to develop a practice independent of her husband’s.
In 1994 she established MJ Long and Kentish Architects in partnership with Rolfe Kentish, who had also been part of the British Library team. Two years later they won a competition to design a £32 million mixed-use project on Falmouth waterfront, incorporating a Cornish outpost of the National Maritime Museum. The project was a resonant one for Long, who maintained a second home on the Sussex coast so that she and her family could sail. Built in long-lasting slate, granite and green oak, the Museum is a highly crafted building, which, typically of MJ Long’s work, makes rich use of natural light.
Late commissions included the new Centre for Conservation at the British Library (2007), the Jewish Museum in London (2010) and a sensitive renovation of Porthmeor artists’ studios in St Ives (2011). MJ Long also taught at Yale for many years and chaired the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment’s Design Review Panel. She was reluctant to engage with campaigns directed at improving the architectural profession’s gender imbalance, but as one of strikingly few women leading a significant architectural practice she became a role model for a younger generation.
Colin St John Wilson died in 2007. MJ Long is survived by their daughter and son.