James Stirling's Light Touch Is Exemplified In A Triptych Of University Buildings, Says Patrick Lynch

摘要

James Stirling was always a Modern architect, but Modern in the same sense as Palladio. Agile, pragmatic, ambitious, eclectic; in possession of knowledge of types, yet not enslaved by them; confident with tradition but even more so in their own talent. It is worth noting that the Modernity of these architects is their humanism. Central to humanism is respect for tradition and the belief in one's ability to transform it to answer the needs of one's age. In his review of Le Corbusier's Ronchamp Chapel for the Architectural Review in March 1956, Stirling wasn't scared of expressing his scepticism. His tactic of compositional inversion of Modernist cliches is clear at the Leicester Engineering Building (1959), where the Modernist view of glass -as simply not being there - is reversed. The triangulated glass roofs appear as a line of prisms. On a misty morning the auditorium floats above the treetops, and the Georgian wired glass in the prisms condenses into smoky ice. At night it appears as slick as solid oil, or as petrified as a frozen pond of black ice. The crystal metaphors of early Modernism are finally made real, not as a dream of openness and disembodiment, but as forms of light coagulated in matter.