Postmodernism's Pivotal Figure
By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE
James Frazer Stirling (1924-1992) was a magnificently talented architect, a large man with a large vision, known to all as "Big Jim." For those of us who admired him then (and still do), he was the most gifted architect of the generation that followed the founders and form givers of modernism in the early 20th century. Born in Glasgow and based in London, he was a pivotal figure in that transitional period that we have given the catchall name of postmodernism, beginning in the 1950s, when modernism began to be seriously questioned for its perceived failure to engage with the real world.
Because he practiced before the phenomenon of the celebrity starchitect, his name is virtually unknown to the public or to architecture students today. He died at the age of 68, shortly after winning the Pritzker Prize and being knighted; his death was unexpected and premature. His buildings were complex and controversial; his deeply thoughtful, experimental explorations of uncharted possibilities were meant to move architecture on, to turn modernism into something more humane, contextual and familiar that users could relate to and understand; his philosophy was constantly evolving, along with a highly personal, eclectic style.
Stirling never relinquished his belief in the rationalism, practicality and necessity of the new forms and technologies; they had changed the built world forever. But the limited vocabulary of the International Style had become, in his words, "exhausted," its buildings "boring, banal, and barren"; their aloofness from their surroundings made them "disruptive and inharmonious when placed in older cities." He was, in a sense, the anti-LeCorbusier, or the anti-Mies, looking for ways to recapture some of the things swept away by the modernists' messianic zeal—connections to history, place and the environment. What we build, he believed, "should not be disassociated from the cultural past."
The search took him through a seemingly odd succession of unrelated styles that his contemporaries found inconsistent and disturbing. The tradition-bound British resisted his competition-winning designs—he built mostly in continental Europe and the U.S.—but no body of work makes it clearer how much more there was to postmodernism than the faux history, funky colors and insider jokes of so many who claimed the movement as their own. With hindsight, it is obvious that his influence has been profound; his transformative impact on the art of architecture is increasingly clear.
An important exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven explores these issues through sketches, drawings, photographs and models selected from the Stirling archives owned by the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. "Notes From the Archive: James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher" is the first major attempt to explore the development of his ideas based on this documentary evidence. The show has been organized in collaboration with the Canadian Center for Architecture, under the curatorship of Anthony Vidler, dean and professor of architecture of the School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York, who has written a scholarly and insightful book on Stirling based on his study of the archives that also serves as the exhibition catalog.
Prof. Vidler has selected about 400 items for display after reviewing 5,000 of the more than 40,000 documents that span Stirling's career from 1949 to 1992, from his student days through his early work with James Gowan, and final partnership with Michael Wilford, to the year of his death. Displayed against a running background of the unmistakable, aggressive green that was Stirling's trademark color—among other heresies, he defied orthodox modernism's primary hues with a wild celebration of purples, golds and greens (his purple socks, worn with a certain gravitas and insouciance, enlivened his otherwise conservative and unremarkable attire). The show is a must-see for any architectural professional or student of architecture, but the studies, notes and axonometric diagrams that record his thoughts and design process may be a little hard going for a general public more accustomed to dramatic sequences of photographic images and drop-dead models of buildings in proper chronological order.
Stirling's architecture contains enough complex material to offer an infinite variety of lessons to each new generation according to its particular interests and needs. Today's revisionist scholars often prefer their own theories to historical facts, but Prof. Vidler has the advantage of knowing this turbulent period well; he was an astute and accurate observer at the time. What his analysis of this archival material gives us is a rewarding and long-overdue reappraisal of an extraordinary architect, humanist and artist who did much to redefine the art of building for the 21st century.
It has been largely forgotten that the immediate postwar period was the time of the New Towns movement, when entire new communities were being constructed across Europe, from Cumbernauld in Scotland to Vällingby in Sweden, to relieve a desperate need for housing and to accommodate the overflow population from older cities. Architects everywhere, including Stirling, were involved in the pursuit of this Utopian dream. Prefabrication and standardized, industrially produced housing were the accepted solution for these social problems. Mistakes were made, as the saying goes, and lessons were learned (and not learned); the most unsuccessful and unpopular housing has been demolished, and those communities that survived have succumbed to the accommodations of taste and time.
Stirling soon saw the unreality of these schemes, perhaps because he grew up in Liverpool where a lot of reality was on view and he was never a member of the architectural elite for whom prefabrication was one of modernism's most cherished illusions. He understood (as many do not to this day) that there was an irreconcilable conflict between the production methods and imposed styles of prefabrication and the "uncertain and sometimes irrational preferences of the consumer and the class he represents."
He also saw the functional and commercial vernacular of Liverpool as a source for a more familiar and time-tested kind of design, and he began to use local materials, like red brick, to modify the structural glass and steel of the university buildings at Cambridge and Leicester done in the late '50s and early '60s, without sacrificing the radical rethinking of program and space that modernism encouraged. By the '70s he was combining the practical technology and functional rationalism of modernist practice with a more conscious relationship of a building to its culture and community.
As architects began to look back at the history modernists had discarded, his interest grew in the neoclassicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This was undoubtedly encouraged when the Luxembourg architect Leon Krier, an avowed classicist and superb delineator, joined Stirling's office in 1968. Mr. Krier's elegant and evocative drawings, with their classical allusions and the odd pieces of Biedermeier furniture, have become associated with much of the firm's output. Stirling's "modern neo-classicism" followed in the '70s, further confounding observers, and some of the more substantial and idiosyncratic Biedermeier furniture was incorporated into his home and studio, where it suited his large frame and eclectic tastes perfectly.
All of these interests and influences were so thoroughly absorbed in his mature work of the '70s and '80s that if you look at buildings like his Clore Gallery (1978-86) for the Tate Museum in London, or the even more striking Staatsgalerie Museum in Stuttgart (1977-84), the impression is never of something derivative or cobbled up out of a collection of ideas; what you are struck by is their total originality and an unparalled personal vision.
But the quality that ties all of Stirling's work together is something that only the greatest architects possess: the unique ability to think volumetrically, to conceptualize and visualize all of a building's components and relationships simultaneously in all three dimensions, reorganizing and reinventing those relationships to create brilliant spatial progressions and shifts in perception and experience that elude more ordinary talents. Pleasure and surprise are some of architecture's most important gifts, and they come only from the most subtle and complex creative acts. Once we have gotten the glitz and bling of recent years out of our eyes, we will see Stirling as the innovator he really was, a man towering over his contemporaries, far ahead of his time.
Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.
This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703921204576005900819004790.html
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