Unpacking my Library • Red Trilogy (James Stirling) • Alan Berman • 2010
I've posted previously about architecture and the expansion of the British University system. I experienced this personally as a transformational moment in Guildford with the construction of the new University of Surrey campus. Quite apart from the individual experience of students and academics, the arrival of the university transformed the town and the wider population.
This book looks at three University buildings by James Stirling. These are...Engineering at Leicester (1963), the History Library at Cambridge (1967) and a block of student accommodation (the Florey Building) at Oxford (1971). These buildings were immediately recognised as significant when built, and are revered by architects. Not withstanding this professional recognition, these buildings have been spectacularly unpopular with their clients, users and with the general public. In the context of this reaction it is amazing that these buildings have survived.
The book examines each if these building projects and accounts for their problems as a consequence of the inevitable compromises that occur as the projects develop on site. There's a long section at the end, when various architects describe the significance of these buildings in relation to their own practices.
Stirling and his colleagues James Gowan and, later, Micheal Wilford are presented as pioneers in the development of modern architecture through a focus on functional space, materials and specification. Their logic was to drive the shape and appearance of the buildings by reference to the specific requirements of its users. This is a bit different from the usual logic of functionality in buildings which has traditionally been associated with flexibility. I suspect that this focus on the specific functionality of these buildings is what has allowed them, against the odds, to survive.
This is understood, in the book, as an important and necessary evolution from the constraints of norm-and-form rationalism attaching to the first iterations of steel, glass and concrete modernism. If not quite post-modernist, it was a significant development.
The Leicester building especially is presented as an early iteration of inside-out design made famous by Rogers and Piano, for the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In Leicester, the requirements of the building were for
01/ the largest workshop space possible on site
03/ offices and spaces associated with a university department
04/ services and circulation (stairs and access etc)
The building is arranged so that the tower of accommodation and associated access, pushes down on the lecture spaces so that they can cantilever out from the tower. The vertical tower, the protrusions of the lecture theatres and the powerful horizontal of the huge workshop, combine into an unusual and exciting sculptural whole; a sort of big jenga.
A similar logic plays out in the other buildings, but in different shapes. Building on oddly shaped sites produces unusual shapes and becomes complicated and expensive...added to which the materials, services and systems required were not, fifty odd years ago, quite up to the required standard.
Architecture is usually described by reference to its appearance and materials. This can quickly become a conversation about small details. What buildings look like is almost the least interesting thing about them. London is full of modern office buildings trying to look different whilst doing the same thing. You can see this clearly around the various 21C campus developments in London associated with the re-purposing of industrial sites in Docklands and along the Acton Corridor and at Battersea etc.
I try and think about scale, space, structure and specification in that order.
