Making a Doll’s House

MJ Long, a British American architect, mother, partner, and teacher, juggled multiple roles throughout her career. At its peak, she designed the British Library, taught design at Yale, and ran a practice from her studio/house focused on smaller but no less significant projects. Amidst these commitments and raising two children, Long also built a large timber doll's house for her daughter during a challenging phase of the British Library project in the late 1970s. Despite her achievements, her work has often been overshadowed by her husband's name. While the RIBA is cataloguing the archive of Colin St John Wilson Architects, which she co-directed, her personal papers remain uncatalogued. The doll's house, not included in the RIBA collection, was auctioned as a, and amongst, domestic items after her death. My research, including a 2023 exhibition at the Architectural Association, explores the doll's house as a junction of Long's influences and roles. It challenges gender stereotypes, presenting the doll's house as an act of care, knowledge, parody, critique, and resistance, offering Long agency she may not have found in the 1:1 world.