James Stirling, student drawing for a Forest Rangers Lookout Station; ink, watercolour, and graphite on paper, 56.5 x 77.5 cm, ca. 1949.
Photograph: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

James Stirling (Firm), interior perspective of the British Olivetti Headquarters, Milton Keynes; ink, coloured pencil, and graphite on paper,
41.6 x 55.1 cm, 1970–74.
Photograph: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

James Stirling and Partner, sketches for the Nordrhein-Westfalen Museum, Dusseldorf; ink and graphite on pre-printed paper, 14.3 x 7.8 cm, 1975.
Photograph: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

James Stirling and Partner, competition model of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne; wood, paper, plastic, and paint,
10.5 x 51.5 x 33 cm, 1975.
Photograph: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

James Stirling, Michael Wilford, and Associates, presentation model of the Bibliothèque de France, Paris; paint, wood, moulded plastic, and metal, 38 x 122 x 123 cm, 1989.
Photograph: James Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal

Notes from the Archive. James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher
Curator: Anthony Vidler

Yale Center for British Art, New Haven‚ Connecticut
14 October 2010 - 2 January 2011


The exhibition Notes from the Archive. James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher, a joint venture between the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the home of Stirling’s archive, must be taken as a methodological statement confronting the existing criticism on Stirling’s work. Particularly at stake are previous critiques that concentrated on the reading of stylistic changes and the classicist turn in the architect’s career, a theme that curator Anthony Vidler himself had addressed in a previous exhibition held at the CCA in 2003-4. That experience led him to believe that reading shifts that focused on issues of architectural language missed the real disciplinary problems and consistencies at the core of Stirling’s thinking, which had been revealed by opening the archive boxes.

The curatorial strategy aims to demonstrate the dialogue between abstract modernism and classical figuration that is to be assumed, from the very beginning, as a continuous mediation in the architect’s long trajectory. Understood as a peaceful co-existence rather than dialectic, and not as an issue of style but instead one of ontological nature, this dialogue in Stirling’s work brings to the fore the larger question concerning the structural role of history in architectural modernity, which unfolds in the different thematic sections of the exhibition.

The first section, ‘The Formation of an Architect’, presents the eclectic work of Stirling as a student at Liverpool School of Architecture experimenting with the contemporary forms of a consolidated modernism.

The following three sections constitute the critical core of the exhibition. The first, ‘Modernism in Crisis’, opens with Stirling’s famous Blackbook. Containing his reflections between 1953 and 1956, the Blackbook became the guardian of an early struggle with the legacy of a modern architecture that had not lived up to its pre-Second World War social precepts, and the architect’s attempt to situate a contemporary practice at the crossroads of the discipline’s history. In the drawings of the Stiff Dom-ino, his own diagram of the Modulor, and his articles on Le Corbusier’s domestic projects and Ronchamp, Stirling’s simultaneous engagement and disenchantment with the modernist architect becomes palpable. The housing and planning projects developed during the 1950s by the partnership of Stirling and James Gowan, together with Stirling’s Village Housing for CIAM X and the later housing projects for Southgate and PREVI (Peru) are confronted with the architect’s photographs taken of architectural precedents that include historic monuments but also modernist projects (all by Le Corbusier), vernacular constructions, and local industrial buildings in Liverpool.

The next section, ‘New Typologies’, follows as the logical culmination of this process of revision. Paying homage to and expanding Kenneth Frampton’s interpretation in Architectural Forum (1968) of Stirling’s British works as ‘social condensers’, this section accentuates the institutional projects for university and corporate buildings, from Sheffield to the British Olivetti Headquarters, as singular and sophisticated contributions to the modern tradition of inventing spaces intended to activate social relationships.

If the two previous sections underline the critical relation of the architect’s work to its immediate past, ‘Urban Assemblages’ frames it in the context of its present. By strategically displaying the original copies of three key texts – Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s 1975 article ‘Collage City’ (Architectural Review 158, August 1975), the Italian catalogue of the 1973 Milan Triennale Architettura Razionale curated by Aldo Rossi, and Stirling’s own text ‘Stirling Connections’ (Architectural Review 157, May 1975) – Vidler proposes the city as the theme central not only to Stirling’s thinking but to the architectural epistemology of the period. More than the city as physical context or ideal, this is the ‘Third Typology’, the ‘ontological’ city as the ultimate product of man that replaced the previous models of nature and machine as epistemological authority and reference for the architectural discourse in the late 1960s and 1970s, as theorized by Vidler in his Oppositions editorial in 1976-77.

With this conceptual framework, the projects displayed – including Derby and St. Andrews Arts Centre; several German museums; projects for American universities (Rice, Cornell, and Harvard); and a panel for the 1978 workshop-exhibition Roma Interrotta – become an inventory of explorations.  They prompt an analysis of the ways that Stirling re-imagined the city and evoked its history, and, as Vidler argues in the catalogue, how he did it differently from either Rowe’s sense of an imagined tradition or Rossi’s structural analysis of ahistorical typologies. It is precisely in the study of the implied city in the individual projects that the problematic use of classical elements and forms from the past resurfaces. As expression of the architect’s imagination, this reappearance hints at the unavoidable dependency of the ‘ontological’ city on recognizable forms and questions the inevitable classicist tones of such legibility.

‘The Scene of Drawing’ suggests studying the axonometric drawing adopted by the architect throughout the design process as the locus of his thinking. And yet, the projects extensively documented here – Biblioteca Pubblica for Latina, Italy, the entry for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and especially the Wissenchaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung – also read as ulterior ‘urban assemblages’ that expand on the previous section. The exhibition ends with a glimpse of lecture notes and recordings that recall a lesser-known Stirling, the writer and speaker, perhaps proposing another approach to the analysis of the archive.

If Vidler’s enterprise successfully displaces the issue of Stirling’s stylistic change as the focus of criticism, it does so in order to restate it as part of a broader historical problem that must take into account the structural and ontological value of history and the city in the different facets it assumed in architectural discourses between the 1960s and 1980s. Here, the overlapping continuities and ruptures call for new instruments of interpretation.


Marta Caldeira
[Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University]


Publication related to the exhibition:

Anthony Vidler, James Frazer Stirling. Notes from the Archive, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, 300 pp., 360 colour ill., $ 70, ISBN    978-03-00167-23-8