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James Stirling: Writings on Architecture
This series provides a survey of the vast body of theoretical work produced by modern and contemporary architects and examines the major projects and themes of international architecture.
The written word thus becomes a useful means of studying and analysing planning processes and questions relating to the modern city and urban and spatial design.
These publications are not just systematic collections of writings or transcripts of conferences and public statements but are also attempts by the architects themselves to reformulate their oeuvre and to produce new, unpublished work. The texts are accompanied by original illustrations, often produced specifically for these publications, and by critiques and bibliographies of the architects' work.
This series provides a survey of the vast body of theoretical work produced by modern and contemporary architects and examines the major projects and themes of international architecture.
The written word thus becomes a useful means of studying and analysing planning processes and questions relating to the modern city and urban and spatial design.
These publications are not just systematic collections of writings or transcripts of conferences and public statements but are also attempts by the architects themselves to reformulate their oeuvre and to produce new, unpublished work. The texts are accompanied by original illustrations, often produced specifically for these publications, and by critiques and bibliographies of the architects' work.
The written word thus becomes a useful means of studying and analysing planning processes and questions relating to the modern city and urban and spatial design.
These publications are not just systematic collections of writings or transcripts of conferences and public statements but are also attempts by the architects themselves to reformulate their oeuvre and to produce new, unpublished work. The texts are accompanied by original illustrations, often produced specifically for these publications, and by critiques and bibliographies of the architects' work.
This series provides a survey of the vast body of theoretical work produced by modern and contemporary architects and examines the major projects and themes of international architecture.
The written word thus becomes a useful means of studying and analysing planning processes and questions relating to the modern city and urban and spatial design.
These publications are not just systematic collections of writings or transcripts of conferences and public statements but are also attempts by the architects themselves to reformulate their oeuvre and to produce new, unpublished work. The texts are accompanied by original illustrations, often produced specifically for these publications, and by critiques and bibliographies of the architects' work.
288 pages, Paperback
First published December 18, 1998
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December 27, 2022
James Stirling placed considerable value on saying as little as possible to explain what his architecture was all about. The more he was besieged to break with this reticence the more it irritated him, since he derided the greater part of contemporary theorising about architecture as so much hot air. I think he hoped that architecture would be apprehended in silence, as is music, and the work of the writers he did respect was admired for the elegance with which they would ultimately always draw one's attention back to something visual.
Knowing he was no Summerson himself, he wanted his architecture to stand on its own feet without too many written elucidations; his reticence, far from being a defect of omission, can be seen as a conscious cultural decision. Given that this was where he stood, one wonders what he might have made of a book like this: an incomplete collection of jottings, assorted project descriptions and occasional scribblings – the sparse pronouncements occasionally dragged out of him under duress.
Yet when he gets going (as in his lecture to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1965) there is a robust quality to his writing that places it in a high category, making one think of Palladio, whose similarly laconic comments to the drawings in the Quattro Libri had the same down-to-earth quality. Noble company indeed; and yet Robert Maxwell seems to feel that some apologia for Stirling's prose may be in order, perhaps to explain to an audience force-fed on Liebeskind or Tafuri why such a great man could write in such a strange and unliterary way. But architects have picked up some bad literary habits in these times, and rather than make apologies for Stirling's style, perhaps there are qualities to it from which we could all benefit – were we only able to capture the same warmth, honesty, gutsiness, and the authority he had inside, of an architect absolutely at home in architecture.
Unfortunately, the pieces collected here are not all Stirling's own unaided work, and one is even surprised to find a piece of one's own, "The restructuring of Palazzo Citterio," reproduced verbatim and to which Stirling made no contribution. It was in general use by the office as an all-purpose official document and, left among his papers, seems to have been erroneously passed on to Maxwell as a Stirling original.
Maxwell does realise that significant parts of these writings may not be Stirling's unaided work – notably the three fine essays published in journals of the 1950s: "Garches to Jaoul", "Ronchamp", and "Regionalism", which are undoubtedly the work of Colin Rowe as much as of Stirling. Not only for their highly wrought literary style, but more importantly for the analytical complexity of the ideas they contain, which is far more typical of Rowe than Stirling. In some important respects, Stirling was the offshoot of Rowe as much as was Boswell of Dr. Johnson, and no doubt these three essays, published in the Architectural Review in 1956 and the Architect’s Year Book for 1957, were born out of long conversations and extensive travels together.
It is indeed possible Stirling wrote them in draft, but their definitive style is that of someone with a lifetime vocation for writing and thinking – by which one means Rowe. In fact, Stirling never wrote anything in this style again, and the other pieces in the book are much more gruff and reticent; nowhere else does he display a comparable use of syntax or vocabulary, and his own style is markedly different.
Be that as it may, the two essays dealing with the evolutions in the later work of Le Corbusier (of which Stirling always disapproved) and that on Regionalism remain among the important architectural writing of our time. They mark the exact point at which the world was breaking into two camps: those who would strive to reiterate the modernist canon as closely as possible or navigate around it, and those – including Stirling (remotely controlled by Rowe) – who would attempt to break away from it entirely. That is where we are still at today, and the three Stirling/Rowe essays of the Fifties mark the point at which the process began.
In these essays, doubts are expressed about the direction Corbu’s work was taking, and for the first time the word crisis appears. The essay on Regionalism is perhaps the first theoretical attempt to suggest that it might be OK if the autochthonous language of white modernism were to become radically altered by exposure to the specific circumstances of a particular place, and to change accordingly. Thus the universalising agenda of international modernism is stood on its head, and those who took that path – Stirling included – no longer felt able to stick to the preconceived ideological agenda of Modernism.
Others upbraided them for what appeared to be an immoral, opportunistic lack of commitment to anything or, as Maxwell notes, "in reacting to changes in society, Stirling laid himself open to charges of being inconsistent, superficial, perhaps irresponsible". This was because he refused to adhere to a set of conventions he knew could not be expected to last forever. In his eagerness to see what might come when the strict modernist canon had exhausted itself – not content to wait and see along with everybody else – Stirling does indeed seem to have lost his way and was trying to find it again when, suddenly, he died.
Egged on by Rowe, he had become convinced early on there had been a great mistake and – unaware of the larger forces that operate to determine city transformation – in a perversion of Le Corbusier’s own thinking, he was left in no doubt that modern architecture was single-handedly destroying the kind of city he took as given and in which he and Rowe had spent their formative years (Victorian Glasgow and Liverpool). On this wholly nostalgic and pessimistic assumption, unable to envisage a role for modernism in bringing about a future city-in-becoming but only regretting the loss of the one that would have to be destroyed to make this possible, he felt impelled to take a different journey from which he came back bearing only historical, referential, self-conscious kitsch (like No. 1 Poultry, subsequently completed post-mortem by others).
Others tried to persuade him to revert to the pure volumetries of an earlier period – a position he had set out in his essay on "The Functional Tradition" of 1959, in which, berating the Americans for their use of styling and "the introduction of historical fragments" into architecture (something of which he later became himself the world’s most noted proponent), he declared a belief in the purity of undecorated space and volume. But the concept of a return was unknown to him, and had he lived, it is unlikely he would have ever again assumed the revolutionary position of former years. That task he initiated is now left for others to develop in other ways.
This is the cautionary tale Stirling has left for us to ponder: the greatest architect of his time abandoning his own courageous precepts and becoming a member of the jet set, beloved by the bourgeoisie, taking on airs and graces and becoming a snob, his work no longer a threat to anyone and in the end consciously trying to make an architecture that was intended to be facile and enjoyable – no longer confrontational and fresh as his earlier buildings still are.
Of the many, apart from Rowe, who were influential in effecting the change, there was a crucial moment in the early Seventies when Léon Krier worked in his office. There took place a dialectic between modernism and neoclassicism that was exemplified by the project for Derby Town Centre, which, according to anecdotal evidence, Krier wanted to be literally classical with arches and columns, but which Stirling cleaned up to keep it "modern". Out of these tensions a major new style might have emerged, but Stirling allowed it to overbalance in favour of what was later to be called Po-Mo; and after that there was no turning back.
Krier is scrupulously avoided in this book, but there was a time when he had been extravagantly lauded by Stirling in an interview (later disavowed by Stirling himself in a letter to the French magazine, claiming he had been drunk at the time) as the best person who had ever worked in his office. That interview is one of the many things that do not appear in this collection and indeed Krier does not seem to be mentioned at all – persona non grata, perhaps.
On the credits page a special thank [sic] is offered to the James Stirling Foundation, and in many ways this does seem to be an officially authorised anthology from which important writings have been withheld; not only the interview mentioned but also other important pieces, such as Stirling’s description of the "Roma Interrotta" competition project of 1977 (but which can be read elsewhere). This was a valuable summary of his whole critique of the contemporary European city and architecture’s failure to deal with it, and its omission is hardly forgivable – particularly in an Italian publication.
At a time when Stirling has been coming under attack from various quarters and his work damaged or destroyed, a carelessly edited book like this – incomplete and therefore lacking in objectivity – does not do him justice. Despite the thoughtful essay by Maxwell, the visual parts of it, to which he would have attached by far the most importance, are not handled carefully. The plan of his Düsseldorf museum project of 1975 is incorrectly printed in landscape format instead of portrait, whilst a sketch on page 186 is certainly not by him at all. Some of the captions are bad translations from the Italian: "unità abitativa stiff Dom-ino" has been rendered as "Living unity stiff Domino", and the Woolton House project of 1954 has become "House at Woolton".
One fears that many an ingenuous reader may be misled into thinking this is a complete collection or that Stirling believed writing and talking about architecture was in some way important enough to merit a special anthology. Because of the preeminence it gives to words over images, the book cannot take account of major influences like Krier and others to whom Stirling allowed a determinant role, and who spent their time drawing and designing rather than writing. It is clear why he would never have allowed such a book to appear in his lifetime. Now, the deed is done; but it is hardly a cause for celebration.
Knowing he was no Summerson himself, he wanted his architecture to stand on its own feet without too many written elucidations; his reticence, far from being a defect of omission, can be seen as a conscious cultural decision. Given that this was where he stood, one wonders what he might have made of a book like this: an incomplete collection of jottings, assorted project descriptions and occasional scribblings – the sparse pronouncements occasionally dragged out of him under duress.
Yet when he gets going (as in his lecture to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1965) there is a robust quality to his writing that places it in a high category, making one think of Palladio, whose similarly laconic comments to the drawings in the Quattro Libri had the same down-to-earth quality. Noble company indeed; and yet Robert Maxwell seems to feel that some apologia for Stirling's prose may be in order, perhaps to explain to an audience force-fed on Liebeskind or Tafuri why such a great man could write in such a strange and unliterary way. But architects have picked up some bad literary habits in these times, and rather than make apologies for Stirling's style, perhaps there are qualities to it from which we could all benefit – were we only able to capture the same warmth, honesty, gutsiness, and the authority he had inside, of an architect absolutely at home in architecture.
Unfortunately, the pieces collected here are not all Stirling's own unaided work, and one is even surprised to find a piece of one's own, "The restructuring of Palazzo Citterio," reproduced verbatim and to which Stirling made no contribution. It was in general use by the office as an all-purpose official document and, left among his papers, seems to have been erroneously passed on to Maxwell as a Stirling original.
Maxwell does realise that significant parts of these writings may not be Stirling's unaided work – notably the three fine essays published in journals of the 1950s: "Garches to Jaoul", "Ronchamp", and "Regionalism", which are undoubtedly the work of Colin Rowe as much as of Stirling. Not only for their highly wrought literary style, but more importantly for the analytical complexity of the ideas they contain, which is far more typical of Rowe than Stirling. In some important respects, Stirling was the offshoot of Rowe as much as was Boswell of Dr. Johnson, and no doubt these three essays, published in the Architectural Review in 1956 and the Architect’s Year Book for 1957, were born out of long conversations and extensive travels together.
It is indeed possible Stirling wrote them in draft, but their definitive style is that of someone with a lifetime vocation for writing and thinking – by which one means Rowe. In fact, Stirling never wrote anything in this style again, and the other pieces in the book are much more gruff and reticent; nowhere else does he display a comparable use of syntax or vocabulary, and his own style is markedly different.
Be that as it may, the two essays dealing with the evolutions in the later work of Le Corbusier (of which Stirling always disapproved) and that on Regionalism remain among the important architectural writing of our time. They mark the exact point at which the world was breaking into two camps: those who would strive to reiterate the modernist canon as closely as possible or navigate around it, and those – including Stirling (remotely controlled by Rowe) – who would attempt to break away from it entirely. That is where we are still at today, and the three Stirling/Rowe essays of the Fifties mark the point at which the process began.
In these essays, doubts are expressed about the direction Corbu’s work was taking, and for the first time the word crisis appears. The essay on Regionalism is perhaps the first theoretical attempt to suggest that it might be OK if the autochthonous language of white modernism were to become radically altered by exposure to the specific circumstances of a particular place, and to change accordingly. Thus the universalising agenda of international modernism is stood on its head, and those who took that path – Stirling included – no longer felt able to stick to the preconceived ideological agenda of Modernism.
Others upbraided them for what appeared to be an immoral, opportunistic lack of commitment to anything or, as Maxwell notes, "in reacting to changes in society, Stirling laid himself open to charges of being inconsistent, superficial, perhaps irresponsible". This was because he refused to adhere to a set of conventions he knew could not be expected to last forever. In his eagerness to see what might come when the strict modernist canon had exhausted itself – not content to wait and see along with everybody else – Stirling does indeed seem to have lost his way and was trying to find it again when, suddenly, he died.
Egged on by Rowe, he had become convinced early on there had been a great mistake and – unaware of the larger forces that operate to determine city transformation – in a perversion of Le Corbusier’s own thinking, he was left in no doubt that modern architecture was single-handedly destroying the kind of city he took as given and in which he and Rowe had spent their formative years (Victorian Glasgow and Liverpool). On this wholly nostalgic and pessimistic assumption, unable to envisage a role for modernism in bringing about a future city-in-becoming but only regretting the loss of the one that would have to be destroyed to make this possible, he felt impelled to take a different journey from which he came back bearing only historical, referential, self-conscious kitsch (like No. 1 Poultry, subsequently completed post-mortem by others).
Others tried to persuade him to revert to the pure volumetries of an earlier period – a position he had set out in his essay on "The Functional Tradition" of 1959, in which, berating the Americans for their use of styling and "the introduction of historical fragments" into architecture (something of which he later became himself the world’s most noted proponent), he declared a belief in the purity of undecorated space and volume. But the concept of a return was unknown to him, and had he lived, it is unlikely he would have ever again assumed the revolutionary position of former years. That task he initiated is now left for others to develop in other ways.
This is the cautionary tale Stirling has left for us to ponder: the greatest architect of his time abandoning his own courageous precepts and becoming a member of the jet set, beloved by the bourgeoisie, taking on airs and graces and becoming a snob, his work no longer a threat to anyone and in the end consciously trying to make an architecture that was intended to be facile and enjoyable – no longer confrontational and fresh as his earlier buildings still are.
Of the many, apart from Rowe, who were influential in effecting the change, there was a crucial moment in the early Seventies when Léon Krier worked in his office. There took place a dialectic between modernism and neoclassicism that was exemplified by the project for Derby Town Centre, which, according to anecdotal evidence, Krier wanted to be literally classical with arches and columns, but which Stirling cleaned up to keep it "modern". Out of these tensions a major new style might have emerged, but Stirling allowed it to overbalance in favour of what was later to be called Po-Mo; and after that there was no turning back.
Krier is scrupulously avoided in this book, but there was a time when he had been extravagantly lauded by Stirling in an interview (later disavowed by Stirling himself in a letter to the French magazine, claiming he had been drunk at the time) as the best person who had ever worked in his office. That interview is one of the many things that do not appear in this collection and indeed Krier does not seem to be mentioned at all – persona non grata, perhaps.
On the credits page a special thank [sic] is offered to the James Stirling Foundation, and in many ways this does seem to be an officially authorised anthology from which important writings have been withheld; not only the interview mentioned but also other important pieces, such as Stirling’s description of the "Roma Interrotta" competition project of 1977 (but which can be read elsewhere). This was a valuable summary of his whole critique of the contemporary European city and architecture’s failure to deal with it, and its omission is hardly forgivable – particularly in an Italian publication.
At a time when Stirling has been coming under attack from various quarters and his work damaged or destroyed, a carelessly edited book like this – incomplete and therefore lacking in objectivity – does not do him justice. Despite the thoughtful essay by Maxwell, the visual parts of it, to which he would have attached by far the most importance, are not handled carefully. The plan of his Düsseldorf museum project of 1975 is incorrectly printed in landscape format instead of portrait, whilst a sketch on page 186 is certainly not by him at all. Some of the captions are bad translations from the Italian: "unità abitativa stiff Dom-ino" has been rendered as "Living unity stiff Domino", and the Woolton House project of 1954 has become "House at Woolton".
One fears that many an ingenuous reader may be misled into thinking this is a complete collection or that Stirling believed writing and talking about architecture was in some way important enough to merit a special anthology. Because of the preeminence it gives to words over images, the book cannot take account of major influences like Krier and others to whom Stirling allowed a determinant role, and who spent their time drawing and designing rather than writing. It is clear why he would never have allowed such a book to appear in his lifetime. Now, the deed is done; but it is hardly a cause for celebration.
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