Sir James Frazer Stirling (1924–1992)

by Snowdon, 1984

Snowdon / Camera Press, London; collection National Portrait Gallery, London

Stirling, Sir James Frazer (1924–1992), architect, was born at 195 Kent Road, Glasgow, on 22 April 1924, in the tenement flat of his grandmother, the widow of a Glasgow engine-fitter. His father, Joseph Stirling (d. 1957), was a ship's engineer who had moved to Liverpool to work for the Blue Funnel line, of which he later became chief engineer. His mother, Louisa Jane Frazer (d. 1974), came from Ulster farming stock and had worked in Liverpool as a schoolteacher. They had one other child, Oonagh (b. 1928), and settled at 24 Childwall Road, in south-west Liverpool. About 1935 Stirling went to the nearby Quarry Bank secondary day school, then flourishing under the enlightened headmastership of Richard Fitzroy Bailey. He showed promise in art class but was otherwise entirely without distinction at school; a master later described him as 'of all his pupils perhaps the least likely to succeed in later life'. Yet between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, apparently unknown to the school, he became a bird-watcher whose observations—made on expeditions to the Wirral, Wales, and Cumberland—were acknowledged in the fifth (1940) volume of H. F. Witherby's Handbook of British Birds.

Stirling had passed no exams, but his art work and the backing of the school got him accepted at the school of art in Liverpool University. He combined studying there part-time in 1940–41 with uninteresting work in an architect's office. Although his occupations exempted him from call-up, he volunteered for military service in 1942, was accepted as a recruit in the Black Watch, and was commissioned in that regiment in July 1943. He proved allergic to its traditions and soon transferred to the Parachute regiment. He took part in the D-day landing on 6 June 1944, was wounded and flown back to Britain, returned in August but was soon wounded again, this time more seriously, in the left wrist and lungs. Back in Britain he spent some time in military hospitals and was demobilized, with a small disability pension, in April 1946. On the strength of his year at the school of art he was accepted in September as a student at Liverpool School of Architecture and was allowed to qualify for his degree in four years rather than five.

At Liverpool, Stirling was exposed to two influences: the Beaux-Arts approach traditional to the school, with its emphasis on clarity of planning and composition and its eclecticism, which accepted the modern movement as only one among different allowable styles, and the committed modernism of Colin Rowe, a charismatic young teacher (and later a close friend) who encouraged Stirling in admiration for Le Corbusier and belief in the contemporary relevance of Renaissance architectural theory. As a student Stirling reacted against the Beaux-Arts tradition but, as he later admitted, it permanently influenced his approach to design. After six months in an architectural firm in New York, arranged by the school, he returned for his final year, and graduated with distinction in the summer of 1950. He moved to London in the same year, ostensibly for postgraduate studies at the school of town planning in Gordon Square, but essentially to look for work and a career.

Young, good-looking, still slim, with the glamour of his parachutist past and a reputation which preceded him from Liverpool, passionately dedicated to architecture and convinced of his talent, but leavening hard work with drink and womanizing, Stirling combined self-confidence and single-mindedness with geniality, a laconic wit, and an at times engaging naïvety. He quickly moved into a circle of young radical architects, artists, designers, and jazz musicians, which included Peter Reyner Banham, Peter and Alison Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Douglas Steven, Colin St J. Wilson, George Melly, Patrick Hamilton, Magda Cordell, and John McHale. Hungry for work, he poured his frustration into a notebook, lamenting England's lack of a great architect, the split between 'art architecture' and 'technological non-art architecture', and the need for a 'programmatic building' to reconcile the two. Meanwhile he worked in architects' offices, entered unsuccessfully for two competitions, taught at the Architectural Association, and in 1956 contributed to one of the twelve entries in the ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

In 1955 a commission to design a small housing development at West Ham in outer London encouraged Stirling to set up in private practice with James Gowan, who had been with him in the firm of Lyons, Israel, and Ellis. The partnership proved creative, though not without clashes of approach and personality. The crisply detailed combination of brick and exposed concrete at Ham Common, much influenced by Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul in Paris, was welcomed in the architectural press as an example of the ‘New Brutalism’, to Stirling's annoyance. Outstanding designs for the new Churchill and Selwyn colleges, both in Cambridge, were unexecuted, but in 1959 the powerful backing of Sir Leslie Martin gained the partnership a firm commission to design the engineering building at Leicester University.

The result, completed in 1963 to international acclaim, could claim to be Stirling's ‘programmatic’ reconciliation of art and technology. The boldly cantilevered lecture theatres, the skin of red engineering bricks and patent glazing, the factory roofs of the workshop block, all suggested a commitment to technology. But the grace of the tower on its slender stilts, the delicate balance between tower and theatres, the crystalline faceting of the glazing, the sheen and clear bright colours of the building as a whole, were as aesthetically delightful as a piece of highly wrought jewellery. It was an architecture of enjoyment.

The engineering building led to four related commissions, though without the contribution of Gowan, for the partnership split up in 1963: the history faculty building at Cambridge (1963–7), the Andrew Melville hall of residence at St Andrew's (1964–8), the Florey Building for Queen's College, Oxford (1966–71), and the Olivetti training centre at Haslemere (1969–73). The Cambridge and Oxford buildings used the Leicester language of red tiles or bricks, the Andrew Melville hall was made up of pre-cast concrete pods, and the Olivetti building of smoothly rounded PVC units. All four showed the same gift for striking composition and contrasts of material, the same telling repetition of faceted or flowing forms, the same fondness for lavish glazing and bright, not to say bizarre, colours.

Stirling was now an international cult figure among architects, the renowned Big Jim (for by 1971 he had swollen to over 20 stone) of the bright blue shirt, the bright green plastic attaché case, the gruff laconic voice, the amazing capacity for drink, to whose office in Gloucester Place young architects travelled from all over the world to work. There was a debit side. His heavily glazed buildings, using new materials or at least new combinations of materials, usually built on inadequate budgets by contractors, and sometimes under clients who were not in sympathy with him, ran into practical problems that were made much of by the large numbers of people who found them strange and antagonistic rather than vivid and exciting. He got the reputation of an architect whose buildings ‘didn't work’, and between 1969 and 1977 no commissions came his way.

These difficult years were helped out by part-time teaching (started in 1955) at the school of architecture, Yale University, where Stirling became legendary for brilliant teaching combined, at least in his early years, with often outrageous behaviour. A succession of more serious personal relationships culminated in 1966 with his marriage on 10 October to the furniture designer Mary Elizabeth Lawrence Shand (b. 1928/9), the daughter of Sybil Sissons and John Ambrose Steel, who had taken the name of her stepfather after her mother's remarriage to the writer and architectural critic P. Morton Shand. There were a son and two daughters of the marriage. The Stirlings moved into a house in Belsize Avenue, north London. Stirling accepted its quirky turn-of-the-century detailing, and filled it with a deliberately eclectic and contrasting mixture of contents, ranging from Paolozzi prints to neo-classical furniture by Thomas Hope and George Bullock. He was also becoming aware of neo-classical architects, especially Schinkel. His designs reflected his developing interests. A remarkable but unsuccessful entry to a competition for an art gallery in Düsseldorf in 1975 was followed in 1977 by a related competition entry for a major addition to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. If this had failed to win he would have had to close his office for lack of work. He did not fail, and the resulting Neuestaatsgalerie (1977–84) enjoyed a success comparable to that of the Leicester engineering building.

Stuttgart developed on his earlier executed works both in the way it was fitted into the townscape and in its richer architectural language. Its unifying feature was a public pedestrian route through its centre, leading down a steepish hillside by way of a ramp inside the perimeter of a monumental circular courtyard and emerging on a terrace looking over the centre of Stuttgart, before the subtly curving glass of the entrance façade. The simplicity of the main concept was enriched by numerous references to other buildings and styles. Neo-classical echoes combined with light-hearted exercises in glass and brightly coloured steel, used decoratively rather than constructively, as a kind of deliberate turning of the modern movement upside down, just as the circular court was inspired by the domed rotunda in Schinkel's Altesmuseum in Berlin, but with the dome taken off. Inevitably and not unreasonably, this and subsequent essays in enlarging the language of contemporary architecture were described as post-modern, a label which Stirling repudiated and much disliked.

With a sympathetic client, an ample budget, and superbly competent contractors, Stuttgart escaped the practical troubles which had bedevilled Stirling's earlier works. It was followed, as Leicester had been, by a clutch of related designs, including the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University (1978–84), the Wissenschaftzentrum in Berlin (1979–87), the Clore Building at the Tate Gallery, London (1980–86), and the Center for the Performing Arts at Cornell University (1983–8). As at Stuttgart these later buildings are full of references to (but never copies of) historic buildings, are carefully fitted to their sites, interlarded with much glazing and with exposed or partly exposed steelwork, and are full of complexity, contrast, and colour. The Berlin design, for instance, was made up of distinct elements reminiscent of a basilica, a loggia, a tower, and a castle, all sheathed in pink and blue stripes.

Most of these buildings (all backed up by drawings of great beauty) developed out of a similar design process. Different members of Stirling's office (in which Michael Wilford had been a partner since 1971) produced different schemes, which Stirling then altered, amalgamated, added to, and played games with; this virtuosity produced buildings highly personal to him, but strikingly different from one another. He never achieved another masterpiece of the level of Stuttgart, and to many architects what he was doing seemed puzzling and a betrayal of the modern movement. Some of the commissions had troubled histories, others were built posthumously or not at all. In particular, designs for 1 Poultry, an office building on a superb site adjacent to the Bank of England, involved the destruction of nine listed buildings, were passionately opposed by conservationists, and were not built until 1994–8. To his disappointment he was the runner-up for two projects of world status, the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 1984 and the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London, in 1986. Honours and awards, including the Royal Institute of British Architects queen's gold medal in 1980, the American Pritzker prize in 1981, and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale award in 1986, were not an adequate compensation.

From the mid-1980s Stirling seemed ready for new departures, and talked of going back for inspiration to his first love, Le Corbusier. There were signs of change in an engineering complex at Melsungen in Germany (1986–92), to which a member of his German office, Walter Nägeli, made an important but much debated contribution; in the beautiful pavilion which he designed as a bookshop for the 1991 Venice Biennale; and in an unsuccessful competition entry in the same year for a building for the Venice film festival. This was designed in partnership with a young German architect, Marlies Hentrup, whom he had met in 1977 when teaching at Düsseldorf, and with whom he formed a relationship which filled much of the last decade of his life.

While Stirling's admirers waited and hoped for a building as epoch-making as Leicester and Stuttgart, what should have been a routine operation for a hernia in a private hospital went wrong, and having been moved to the Wellington Humana Hospital in St John's Wood, London, he died on 25 June 1992. It had been announced twelve days earlier that he had been given a knighthood. His wife survived him. In 1996 the RIBA instituted the annual Stirling prize, now recognized as the UK's most prestigious prize for architecture.