Chapter 1 of 24
James Stirling
But first I should say there are many who helped me, first to going back to the beginning to my mother who was a Scottish Irish school teacher and who early on perceived that I had no heart for my father's wish that I should follow him in going to sea. My father was the archetypal Scottish chief engineer. Ironically it was my discovery of his apprenticeship drawings, beautiful blue and pink wash, sectional drawings of machine parts, turbines, ship's engines, that first opened my eyes to the elegance of functional draftsmanship. Later at architectural school I would thank my good friend and teacher then as now Colin Rowe. Then I would thank my first client in particular Leonard Manusso for whom we built the flats at Ham Common. He had great trust in encouraging me in 1956 to set up an office and start a practice. I particularly wish to thank everyone who has worked with me, consultants, staff, associates and partners. Partner at the beginning James Gowan and in the last several years Michael Wilford. I've always been a designer with wide-ranging interests and perhaps eclectic tendencies. It could hardly have been otherwise. My architectural education was from the books. As a young man I did not work in an office or through the English system of being an article pupil, a practice which seemed to be dying out about 1945 just as I went to architecture school. So my problem was not working for a master or of getting out from under the influence of one. Rather at Liverpool under Professor Budden to succeed one had to be good in many styles. At first we did renderings of classical orders followed by the design of an antique fountain and at the end of that year we had to design a house in the manner of C.A. Voysey. Quite a span of history. In following years we oscillated backwards and forwards between the antique and the just arrived modern movement which for me was a foreign version only as taught by Colin Rowe. In addition to Towards a New Architecture the book which influenced me most at this time was Saxl and Wittkower's huge atlas-like British art and the Mediterranean. This much more so in Wittkower's later architectural principles. This large book was the one that none of our students could get to fit onto our plate glass and wire Albini-style bookshelves. It just lay around on the floor and got looked at. With such an education I developed obsessions through the entire history of architecture. Somewhere in the mid-50s what it to do with finding a genuine brutalism I became interested in the stripy brick and tile Victorian architects like Butterfield, Street, Scott, etc. And when I went to the U.S. as a visiting critic I found the asymmetric turn of the century timber shingle houses of even a town like New Haven, an eye-opener and more interesting than Saarinen or SOM, the current heroes. Though I do confess I was impressed by a limited period of Frank Lloyd Wright's production particularly the concrete block houses around Los Angeles. During my first visits to the U.S. I was also aware of the incredibly high finish and way out aspect of New York art deco buildings such as the Christ the Tower among others. In the whole of Europe it seemed to me we had nothing to come near them. I'd known the Soane Museum from the early 50s and later I became interested in neoclassical architects like Soane, Gandy, Playfair, Goodridge. Their German counterparts Gilly, Weinbrenner, von Klenze, Schinkel seemed to me to extend the process into a later date with a far greater juxtaposition of scales and materials. Actually it is the transition from neoclassical into romantic style in the first half of the nineteenth century which I find particularly interesting. The move from that abstract sparse neoclassicism which somehow carried a maximum of emotive association to the breakup of classicism with the incoming language of realism and naturalism. A fascinating circumstance which I think has parallels in the architectural situation today. But now I should switch to our own limited production.