Potent: Stirling's 1984 Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany. Photograph: Marco Weiss/Alamy
Did the great British architect James Stirling kill architecture
in Great Britain? The question has to be asked since, as well as being
an original and internationally admired talent, who is sometimes said to
be the Francis Bacon of British architecture, he also designed some of
the most notoriously malfunctioning buildings of modern times. Worse,
two of these buildings were in the ancient universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, wherein opinion formers spent their formative years. If you
want to annoy as much of the establishment as possible, there are few
more effective ways than this.
In particular he and his partner
James Gowan designed the history faculty and library at Cambridge,
completed in 1968. Here, as they struggled to study in this alternately
freezing/boiling greenhouse, with dodgy acoustics, frequent leaks and
falling cladding tiles, future columnists and editors incubated a deep
loathing of the building, of Stirling, and by extension all forms of
ambitious modern architecture. In the 1970s the young critic Gavin Stamp
made his name with a remorseless hatchet job on the history faculty. In
the 1980s it narrowly escaped demolition.
In 1984 the
pro-Stirling critic Reyner Banham wrote that "anyone will know who keeps
up with the English highbrow weeklies (professional, intellectual or
satirical), the only approvable attitude to James Stirling is one of
sustained execration and open or veiled accusations of incompetence."
The ‘loathed’ Cambridge history faculty (1968) Photograph: Neil Grant/Alamy
Behind most broadsheet tirades against modern architecture in the
last 40 years stands the figure of James Stirling. And, when architects
are now subjected to the most elaborate forms of control and project
management, squeezing out invention in the interests of reducing risk,
it is in order to avoid mishaps much like the Cambridge history faculty.
Stirling was seen as the very type of the award-winning architect whose
buildings don't work. He was, to boot, arrogant, lecherous and
sometimes boorish. At a party in the apartment of the New York architect
Paul Rudolph, he chose to express himself by urinating against its huge
window, from the terrace outside, facing into the crowd of guests.
Yet he continues to hold an honoured place. The
Stirling prize,
inaugurated shortly after his death in 1992, is named after him. Now,
as the wheel of fashion grinds inevitably round, his work is up for
reappraisal. Next month
Tate Britain will honour him with an
exhibition
based on the impressive archive of his work owned by the Canadian
Centre for Architecture. These drawings will reveal him as a more
subtle, complex and even charming character. They are skilful, sometimes
refined, sometimes informal. Some drawings, composed as presentation
pieces after a design was complete, have an abstract elegance. At other
times he would cover sheets of writing paper, diary pages and the backs
of plane tickets and telegrams with thickets of sketches, as he worked
ideas over and over. They might be plans, diagrams or three-dimensional
views. They have energy, with much-repeated lines or brisk hatching or
Klee-like arrows scurrying through them.
They are signs of
thinking with his hands, of trying things out, of exploring and
excavating. These are not the disdainful doodles that some architects
dash off, hoping that it will be taken as a sign of genius that they can
be done so thoughtlessly. They show complete faith that the design of
buildings is a serious business, to be pursued with time, testing,
consideration and debate. He might try several versions of an elevation,
with differences that would not be obvious to a casual observer.
Stirling’s student drawing, Forest Ranger’s Lookout Station, 1949. Photograph: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds/CCA
They also show faith that architecture is something like music or
painting or literature, that it is something to be composed, with
tensions and harmonies to be resolved within its overall structure.
Stirling kept considering his art in relation to that of others, both
20th-century figures like
Le Corbusier
and the Russian constructivists, and architects of the Italian
renaissance, or the grand industrial architecture of Liverpool, where he
grew up. His designs and drawings set up multiple dialogues with other
works. And, like artists and writers, he wanted to be provocative. He
wanted to wake people up.
These tensions and elaborations, these
interplays of forces and allusions, should make it hard to dismiss his
work as mere leaky showmanship. His Florey building for Queen's College
Oxford is a sort of inhabited viaduct turned into theatrical U-shaped
court, a distant derivation of the Oxford quad, facing the river
Cherwell. It is Oxonian and constructivist at once. It is perverse but
you would have to be a dullard not to see its drama. Students there now
comment on its faults but also on the atmosphere generated by this
extraordinary hemi-cauldron.
His later work is more likeable and
less leaky, as Stirling became slightly less reckless, and as he started
building in Germany, where the building industry seemed better equipped
to realise his ambitious ideas. His 1984 Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart,
for example, was one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country,
on account of the force of the building. In this it was a prototype of
the Guggenheim in Bilbao.
At its centre is a great circular stone
court, like an inside-out mausoleum or a new-built ruin, with vines
falling down its walls. A system of ramps takes you through the
building, as if you were climbing a hillside and, at the moments when it
might become too monumental, bright curves of steel and glass lighten
the mood. It is romantic, potent and playful at once, and perfectly
captures the balance between monumentality and motion, between eternity
and perambulation, which is the essence of museums.
The
Staatsgalerie wouldn't work without the pushing and pulling of ideas you
can see in the drawings. It is worked and wrought in a way few
buildings are nowadays. Architects still work hard, and test different
ideas, but they search more for a magic formula in the cladding or the
form which will make the whole building smoothly beautiful and
consistent. There is less sense that a building is composed like a
painting, and that the architect should leave some of his sweat and
brushmarks on the canvas. Stirling's drawings bring on a nostalgia for a
way of designing – among other things, without a computer in sight –
that has gone the way of dodos and drafting boards.
Does his art
justify the malfunctions? There is, to be sure, more than one side to
the argument: Stirling's defenders always said that his projects were
victims of poor construction, cost-cutting and clumsy clients. It can
also be said that time casts a rosy glow over the faults of more distant
architects. The shoddiness of Nash, the impracticality of Vanbrugh and
the budget-busting of many great architects in history are now almost
forgotten and forgiven. The same will probably happen to Stirling.
Stirling
was a very naughty boy. The pleasures of his successes came at an
exorbitant cost, not only in technical failures but also artistic ideas
that didn't quite come off. The number of his works that are
unequivocally admirable are few. Architects are mostly more careful and
responsible now, which is mostly a good thing. But, at his best,
Stirling showed what powerful and moving things buildings can be, and
the world would have been poorer without him.
