James Stirling, “A Personal View of the Present Situation,” Architectural Design (June 1958), reprinted in James Stirling: Writings on Architecture, ed. Robert Maxwell (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 61.
Amanda Reese Lawrence, “Revisioning History: Modern Strategies in Stirling’s Early Work,” OASE No.79 (November 2009), 86. See also her excellent monograph on Stirling’s work through to Stuttgart, James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), especially Chapter 6, “The Remains of Modernism,” 187–211.
Stirling’s design had been selected in 1979 in a limited competition under the auspices of the IBA over three other architects: the Berlin firm of Bangert, Jansen, Scholz, Schuhes; Mario Botta; and Hans Hollein (who ultimately opted out of the competition).
Nikolaus Pevsner, “Modern Architecture and the Historian or the Return of Historicism,” RIBA Journal (April 1961), 236.
Kenneth Frampton, “Stirling’s Building,” Architectural Forum (November 1968), 45.
Projects were all dedicated to the reconstruction and repair of cities damaged by the ravages of “urban renewal” and indiscriminate development. Leon Krier and Maurice Culot’s Rational Architecture, which was exhibited in Brussels and at the Architectural Association, was a re-edit of Aldo Rossi’s “Rationalist” exhibition at the Milan Triennale (1973), Architettura Razionale, XV Triennale di Milano, Sezione Internazionale di Architettura; see, Aldo Rossi, Architettura Razionale (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1973).
Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 3rd edition (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), where despite Stirling’s fervent protest, Jencks welcomed the final “conversion” of James Stirling from “one time modernist” to post-modernism. At the time, the Staatsgalerie bore the brunt of the critique. As Jencks himself had it, “for the PM movement the battles, the Staatsgalerie itself, became a test-case.” Günter Benisch, who had gained second place in the competition, even accused Stirling of fascism, seeing the central drum as a direct reference to the false neo-classicism of Albert Speer.
Pevsner, “Modern Architecture and the Historian,” 236.
From the evidence of more than one hundred preparatory drawings in the Stirling/Wilford fonds at the CCA.
Michael Wilford, “Introduction” to James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates: Buildings and Projects, 1975-1992 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 5.
James Stirling, “Competition Report,” as excerpted in James Stirling: Buildings and Projects, eds. Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 283.
See sketch of ancient Rome in Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture, 2nd edition (Paris: Les éditions G. Crès, 1924), 128. For a reproduction online, see ➝.
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, “We Have One of Each,” in A History of References, Article 5, CCA Blog, March 16, 2018, analyzing drawing “Stirling/Michael Wilford fonds, CCA. AP140.S2.SS1.D57.P6.15.” See a full roster of reproductions from the CCA Stirling/Wilford fonds collection of drawings for the WZB in my James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 246-257.
The historical precedents for these pavilions were to be interpreted loosely enough: Gerd Neumann, for instance, saw the whole composition as a micro-Acropolis, with the nineteenth-century entry pavilion as the Parthenon, the octagonal library as the Tower of the Winds, the semi-circular amphitheater as the Odeon of Herod, and the long rear building as the Stoa of Attalos. See Neumann, “James Stirlings „Spree-Athen“ Eklektizismus!-?” Bauwelt 71, 14 (April 11, 1980): 575–577. But other reviews were less favorable. Manfred Sack, in an article entitled “Alles Bluff,” spoke derisively of this “historical assemblage of building types, containers apparently without meaning,” concluding that it was one of Stirling’s worst buildings: Sack, “Alles Bluff,” Die Zeit, May 6, 1988, see ➝.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Tarnished Stirling,” The New Republic, December 17, 2010. See ➝.
Raphael Moneo, Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 2004), 44.
Geoffrey Howard Baker, The Architecture of James Stirling and His Partners James Gowan and Michael Wilford: A Study of Architectural Creativity in the Twentieth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 232.
John Summerson, “Vitruvius Ludens,” Architectural Review 163, no. 1033 (March 1983): 19.
Written in 1953-54, and first published as Colin Rowe, “Character and Composition,” Oppositions 2 (1974).
Colin Rowe, “Character and Composition; or Some Vicissitudes of Architectural Vocabulary in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Boston: MIT Press, 1976), 60.
Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York: Praeger, 1961).
Jacques Lucan, Composition-Non-Composition: Architecture and Theory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London and Lausanne: Routledge and EPFL Press, 2012).
Lawrence, “Revisioning History,” 86.
James Stirling, “Nolli, Sector VI: Revisions to the Nolli Plan of Rome,” Architectural Design 49, nos. 3-4 (1979), 42.
James Stirling, “Connexions,” Architectural Review 157 (May 1975), 273-276.
Sack, “Alles Bluff.”
See Michael Merrill, Louis Kahn on the Thoughtful Making of Spaces: The Dominican Motherhouse and the Modern Culture of Space (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2010).
Mathias Ungers, G. Geist, J. Sawade, “Student Housing Project, Enschede, The Netherlands, Isometric,” 1964, Museum of Modern Art Collection. See ➝.
Michael W. Farr, “Colour and Contextualism in the Post-Modern Era: Stirling’s Work from the Late 1970s,” in James Stirling and Architectural Colour (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2013).
Farr, “Colour and Contextualism in the Post-Modern Era,” 143-144, 149.
Lawrence, “We Have One of Each.”
Lawrence, “We Have One of Each.”
Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: The Architectural Press, 1966).
Banham, The New Brutalism, 11. Banham added a note, evidently on U.S. Cold War politics, stressing that, “For the purposes of this discussion, ‘Communist’ I take to mean an acceptance of Marxist doctrine on aesthetics, without necessarily implying membership of the Communist Party.”
Banham, The New Brutalism, 15.
James Stirling and James Gowan, “Afterthoughts on the Flats at Ham Common,” Architecture and Building (May 1959), 167. In response to Banham’s characterization of Ham Common as “Brutalist,” they wrote, “The ‘new Brutalism,’ (is) a term which we used to regard on the one hand as a narrow interpretation of one aspect of architecture … and on the other hand, as a well-intentioned but over patriotic attempt to elevate English architecture to an international status,” a sly dig at the Smithsons’s role in the formation of Team X.
Peter Cook, “Lucky Jim,” Architects Newspaper 20 (December 8, 2010), 18.
Cook, “Lucky Jim,” 18.
Claire Zimmerman, “James Stirling Reassembled,” AA Files 56 (2007), 37.
As a guest editor of a 1980 special issue of Architectural Design, Charles Jencks, citing Gerd Neumann’s aforementioned Bauwelt article on the “Athenian classicism” of Sterling’s WZB, summed up: “The building thus becomes, like 19th-century Berlin, something of an enigmatic conjecture on the past, powerful because it characterizes different institutes in different ways, disturbig for its nightmarish recollections, interesting for its urban spaces and perplexing for its classical distortions.” Architectural Design 5/6 (1980): 76. Cited in Arnell and Bickford, James Stirling, 284.