florey building, oxford, england 1966-1971
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
the courtyard, and here's what you see of it without prior arrangements, is what this building is really about. yes, it is typologically related to oxonian quads but the quad is an enclosed space because its origins are religious. the old schools were built for theological studies and as has long been the belief of the church, you must shut out reality if you are to come any closer to god. in that regard, the very fabric of oxford is similar to the ancient cities of iran: from satellite, it looks more like isfahan than it does any of its neighbouring, english towns.
and so, stirling who was a modernist at the time, a modernist with a critical eye to history, did a fragment of a courtyard, open to the river where you can enjoy yourself. enjoyment was never the original purpose of oxford but it must have been high on the list for stirling along with any other emancipating quality he was able to bring to architecture. the connection to the river has since been closed off for what looks like reasons of security (though I couldn't figure out who's afraid of whom in oxford these days), and stirling, the brilliant modernist, abandoned modernism. was he so talented he was bored, or did he fail?
we know his three famous red-tiled buildings all began disintegrating the moment keys were handed to the clients. if you are reading this in L.A. or spain, you'll understand that a leaking roof can be annoying, but under British weather a leaking roof is a crime against humanity and in stirling's buildings, everything leaked. when it finally stopped raining, the pipes would take over.
his contractors were in over their heads and over budget too, the buildings were much too complicated for either. what stirling was asking was more than could be delivered at the time in england but it is doubtful if he cared. his aim was to rewrite the history of British architecture and you are not going to let a plumber get in the way of that.
making architectural history as an architect is not all about clever formal solutions, it is about showing where society is going and stirling showed it in a way that made society want to go somewhere else, if only to stay warm and dry. that doesn't mean that his proposals weren't right, only that their execution wasn't. the open courtyard remains an intense space, bringing students so closely together it is almost voyeuristic. complaints were filed, naturally, about the lack of privacy, but I can't help thinking that stirling was simply welcoming timid students into the sixties, and maybe pushing them a little. to me, the florey looks like the perfect frame for what we hope our university or college years to be today and much more so than the older oxford buildings - or for that matter any new student accomodation I can think of.
the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect florey building oxford university Queen's College glass house courtyard england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC
cambridge university history faculty building, 1964-1967.
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
a glass house posing as a brick building...
the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect cambridge university history faculty building england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile glass architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura house seier+seier creative commons CC
cambridge university history faculty building, 1964-1967.
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
our first stop was cambridge. we came for the monuments but fell for the town.
for sheer compositional exuberance, the history faculty building was a great sight. it is surprisingly small - all those clever moves in so little space - but that only adds to the intensity and charm of it.
I have seen this sold as new brutalism as well as early high tech but the fact is that stirling's three red masterpieces don't fit categories comfortably.
a sense that the history faculty is composed mainly from the outside, and a certain lack of tactile qualities - the hard red tile and pink concrete are not all that generous - relate the building more closely to stirling's final, postmodern works than I had expected. few buildings from the sixties appear so self-aware and so aware of what came before and how the modernist heritage could be rearranged. proto-pomo, maybe. maybe not.
pathetic moment of the trip was being thrown out of the building by a historian who could barely lift her own two arms. I think we left out of pity, puzzled by both historians and their architect.
(panoramic stitch of several photos)
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the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect cambridge university history faculty building england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile glass architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura panorama seier+seier creative commons CC
cambridge university history faculty building, 1964-1967.
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
here is another stitched panorama, this time showing the glazed reading room.
stirling's history faculty building is a glass house but far from the sleek, miesian concept of one. as has often been noted, stirling offers a strange and very personal combination of industrial modern and victorian greenhouse. you can find something similar in the work of foster and rogers - say, the atrium of rogers' lloyds building - but perhaps too much has been made of the two meeting stirling in the U.S. while still students: there is a social consciousness in the work of rogers and a servility in foster, neither of which you'll find here.
rather, stirling's buildings are like highly formal games - and very exciting games at that. their articulated volumes are based closely on the program, less so on the site. the fact that all his early, "heroic" projects share the same materials more than suggests his disregard for the site specific. they were built to be monuments, even when just student housing as we'll see later in oxford.
this particular part of cambridge suffers from the attitude and stirling is not the sole culprit as the edges of our panoramas show: every modern building here is an island with little urban fabric to tie things together except the concrete pavement.
the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect cambridge university history faculty building england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile glass architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC
cambridge university history faculty building, 1964-1967.
architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.
the patterns of circulation in a stirling building are rich and engaging right from his earliest works. if you are in doubt as to what that means, just add children to your modernist house and see how they respond...
in the most successful phase of his career, his cultural projects in germany, stirling extended these architectural promenades to urban scale. cities need rich and engaging circulation and the german cities, recovering equally from allied bombing raids and post-war reconstruction, needed it badly.
and so stirling became, for a while at least, a great urbanist. you wouldn't have thought so, looking at the history faculty. considering his early brush with team X, I like to think that his german works were designed according to van eyck's famous dictum, that a house is a tiny city, a city a huge house, with the added interest that the city could now be a huge stirling house.
the stirling set so far.
Tags: james stirling james stirling architect cambridge university history faculty building england UK modern modernism constructivism red tile ramp pink concrete architecture arquitectura architektur arquitetura Architectuur Architettura seier+seier creative commons CC