Stirling and Gowan: Architecture From Austerity to Affluence

摘要

The past five years have witnessed a remarkable flowering of Stirling scholarship. Until 2010 there were essentially just the collected works in various forms and the biography by Mark Girouard (Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling, 1998), plus the volume of James Stirling: Writings on Architecture edited by Robert Maxwell (1998). Since 2010 no less than five full-scale studies of Stirling have been published. First, in 2010, came Anthony Vidler, James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive and Alan Berman, Jim Stirling's Red Trilogy: Three Radical Buildings, and also, on a smaller scale, Mark Crinson's James Stirling: Early Unpublished Writings on Architecture. Next up was Geoffrey H. Baker's The Architecture of James Stirling and His Partners James Gowan and Michael Wilford (2011). In 2012 came Mark Crinson, Stirling and Gowan: Architecture from Austerity to Affluence and Amanda Reeser Lawrence, James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist. Now, as if as a coda, there is the collection of essays written by the doyen of Stirling interpreters, Robert Maxwell, Ancient Wisdom and Modern Knowbow: Learning to Live with Uncertainty (2013). While welcome to anyone interested in this most intriguing of British architects, this bunching of publications has not been without its drawbacks, as often books have gone to press before the respective authors have been able to properly digest the findings of their precursors. Thus, both Crinson and Reeser Lawrence refer to Vidler and Berman only in their footnotes, suggesting that their manuscripts were effectively completed before these earlier studies were published, and they certainly do not address head-on the major issues raised by them. Where therefore does this new wave of scholarship leave us? And how are we to get a sense of its outline and content?