CONTINUITY IN ARCHITECTURE ARCHIVE

Picture the scene – the garden of an East Anglian manor house in early October in the late 1970s. A group of gauche first year architecture students are enjoying the hospitality of their tutor (the widow of an eminent professor of architecture at a Fenland university) and the company of the great and the good. Alison and Peter are prominent in batik, but many another brutalist hogs the bar. A circle of students are joined by a large man in a blue shirt, slightly perspiring as the evening draws in. A faux- suave nineteen year old decides to break the ice. He clears his throat, restrains his natural air of condescension, and asks the stranger “So, are you an architect?”. Silence follows as James Stirling turns and walks away…

James Stirling 22 April 1926 – 25 June 1992

In 1999 the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal purchased the archive of James Stirling and Michael Wilford’s office, including much material from Stirling’s previous architectural firms. In the linked edition of MOQDOC (a Canadian newsletter for art libraries and archives) the cataloguer Eva-Marie Neumann outlines the archive’s contents and some of its unexpected material which will shortly become available to researchers.

MOQDOC Link

Drawing of the Olivetti Training School, Haslemere 1969
From James Stirling, Buildings & Projects 1950-1974: “the classroom wings were cranked in plan to avoid colliding with groups of very large specimen trees and the wings have been sited along level ground to permit linear expansion. Prefabricated wall/roof units are of glass reinforced polyester (GRP) which are clipped together, a process similar to industrial design products and to Olivetti’s own production of machines and equipment…Seventeen colours for the external GRP were rejected by the local Planning Committee on aesthetic grounds and the original colour scheme [lime green and violet] could be used only inside the building.”

James Stirling 22 April 1926 – 25 June 1992

Doris Lockhart Saatchi has written about the artist Ben Johnson and his encounter with James Stirling.

Johnson became attracted to the artistic issues raised by architecture in 1973, when he first saw James Stirling’s Leicester University Department of Engineering building. He contacted the architect and said he would like to make a painting based on the building, and Stirling expressed interest in commissioning it. Johnson declined the commission but offered the architect first viewing and option to buy. Some time later, he duly presented the finished painting. After a few moments of silence, Stirling walked up to the canvas, tapped it with his fingers, turned to Johnson and said, ‘Too much Ben, not enough Jim.’

Perhaps Johnson’s 1986 painting of the galleries of the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart rebalanced the equation?

James Stirling 22 April 1926 – 25 June 1992