James Stirling was a post-war British Architect who managed to constantly re-invigorate the language of architecture while those around him were either dissolving it in technological utopias or concealing it behind historical masks. His imagination was saturated by an eclectic array of historical precedents from Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor to Mackintosh, Hoffman, Baillie Scott and Voysey; a vocabulary which, under the influence of Colin Rowe at Liverpool University in the 1945, was developed into a prediliction for formal readings of architectural langauges. Stirlings approach to Modernism was perhaps also a characteristically British one, where modernism was oftern said to have arrived too late and to have left too early (It was ousted in the mid 1950's with the help of British couple Alison and Peter Smithson who managed to, as it were, kill their CIAM fathers). Stirling's particular engagement with Modernism, was filtered by the academicicism of Rowe rather than bloodied in the battles of Europe, which might explain his, loose afiliation to its social mission and his periodic stylistic phase changes towards ever more fertile formal and conceptual ground.
Stirlings first phase is distincly Brutalist (although he would repeatedly deny this) in that his Flats at Ham Common in 1958, his Public Housing in Preston in 1959 and his Assembly Hall in Camberwell in 1962 were all predomintley made of brick and concrete. His second phase which combined brick with greenhouse glazing, is marked by a series of three larger university buildings; the Leicester Engineering building, the Cambridge History Faculty, and the Florey building at Oxford. This period of Stirlings work with its bold formal moves (neo-constructivist at a safe distance) and their rigourous material conceptualism (critically rereading Corbusian precepts), launched his reputation as the most gifted architectural mind of his time. A third phase might then be identified involving the proto-high-tech projects for Olivetti before Stirlings office began to turn towards a distinctly neo-historical vocabulary. Stirlings later works, guided by the presence of Leon Krier and the swing of public opinion against Modern Architecture and Planning, turn their formal gaze upon his first love; those pre-modern and vernacular vocabulary of his earlier days. Despite the postmodern bagage, these late works, especially the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, display the same intense and often cryptic intent which still captivates scholars today, a critical intent which always kept his work distinct from those contemporary 'œpoetics of nostalgia,' as Manfredo Tafuri put it, of the New York Five.
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