James Stirling - Opere e progetti 1950-1974 - 1975

James Stirling. Works, Projects 1950-1974. Introduction by John Jacobus. Edizioni di Comunità, 1975. 24 x 28.5 cm, canvas, dust jacket, 183 pages. Text in English and Italian. Black-and-white photographs. In excellent condition – minor damage to the dust jacket. Auction with no reserve!!!!!

Sir James Stirling (Glasgow, April 22, 1924 – London, June 25, 1992) was a British architect.

Biography
He was a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and was among the most important and influential architects of the second half of the 20th century. He is perhaps best known as one of those young architects from various countries who, from 1950 onward, challenged and subverted the compositional and theoretical precepts of the early Modern Movement.

The reinterpretive development, sometimes turbulent and amended, of those precepts was greatly influenced by his master, friend and mentor, the important architectural theorist and urbanist Colin Rowe — he introduced an eclectic spirit that allowed him to delve into the entire history of architecture to derive a source of compositional inspiration, from ancient Rome and the Baroque, through to the many manifestations of the modern period, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Alvar Aalto.

Neue Staatsgalerie, one of Stirling’s best-known works, in Stuttgart (1984)

South-East Facade of the Cambridge University History Faculty building (1968)

Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University

Engineering Building, University of Leicester (1959)

His personal success was secured by his ability to incorporate these encyclopedic references, together with a strong, muscular form, a very decisive architecture, confident gestures that aimed to re-examine the urban form. After serving in the military during the war, Stirling studied architecture from 1945 to 1950 at the University of Liverpool, where Rowe was his teacher. In 1956 he and James Gowan left their assistant positions with the Lyons firm to establish Stirling and Gowan.

One of the best-known outcomes of this collaboration was the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Leicester (1959-63), notable for its technological and geometric character, marked by the use of a three-dimensional drawing based on isometric axonometry viewed from above and below. In 1963 Stirling and Gowan split, and in 1971 Michael Wilford, who had worked at the firm since 1960 and may have been the cause of their rupture, persuaded Stirling to make him partner, and so it remained until Stirling’s death, although he focused on advancing the work from a managerial standpoint and had little influence on the office’s design activity; this activity remained under his supervision with assistants he kept under watch.

During the seventies, Stirling’s architectural signature began to change as did the scale of his projects (perhaps under Wilford’s efficient managerial influence) moving from the small and less profitable to the very large, and Stirling’s architecture became much more than a neoclassical style, though still deeply tied to his revived powerful modernism. This produced a wave of large-scale projects, three major museum projects in Germany (in Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Stuttgart). These seventies projects show him at the apex of his mature style.

Winning the Stuttgart museum competition — the Neue Staatsgalerie — he loaded his powerful core concept with a wide range of architectural play and decorative allusions, which led many to mistakenly view it as an example of postmodernism — a label that did stick but which he rejected. In 1981, he won the Pritzker Prize. The last building completed while he was alive was the library in the Venice Biennale Gardens (completed in 1991).

This was designed by Stirling and Thomas Muirhead, who pushed him toward a more conservative, less sensational and more self-consciously modernist approach. The Venice library was hailed by critic Kenneth Frampton and others as the start of a new, potentially very important phase in Stirling’s work — had he not suddenly died due to postoperative complications from a routine operation. Just before this incident he was offered the title of Knight (in 1992), which, as a rebellious spirit, he accepted reluctantly, stating that it “could be helpful for the work.”

After Stirling’s death in 1992, Wilford took command of the firm and gradually completed the projects that Stirling had started and left unfinished. Various buildings completed after this date and often crudely attributed to Stirling, such as the State University of Music and Art in Stuttgart, 1993-1994, or 1 Poultry in London, were in fact completed and constructed by Wilford and his assistants. The architectural practice no longer exists and the full archives of the office were sold to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The Stirling Prize, a yearly British architecture prize, was established in 1996 and dedicated to this famous architect.

Stirling’s cultural depth and the richness of his work drew the attention of all the world’s major critics and theorists, from Peter Eisenman to Charles Jencks, and the literature examining his architecture, published in every country in the world, is vast. For those seriously interested, the best starting point for in-depth study are two books published that describe all of his work, which he supervised himself, aided by trusted friends and collaborators. These two books chronologically cover every project and emphasize the visual aspect, with thousands of photographs, drawings and meticulously reproduced models.