Gabion: James Stirling is unleashed on London, 1991

"I was in the bloody army," he says. "I was incredibly young. . . 17, 18. . . in the last two years of the war. So I got involved in a very traumatic way with the European problem, with European concerns, when I was that young. Maybe I've never thought of myself as being anything other than European."

There is a pause. Stirling adds: "I'm also from Liverpool. Not a Londoner, not a southerner, so I don't feel influenced by that."

Europe - particularly Germany - has paid Stirling back handsomely since. The people he employs in his offices in Berlin and Stuttgart outnumber the contingent in London where, for all his northern disparagement, he has lived and worked for decades. Things have changed a little, however. He is finally able to build for his client Peter Palumbo, the property developer and now Arts Council chairman, right at the heart of the City at Mansion House. Typically, in the month since he learned of Palumbo's already legendary victory over the massed forces of conservation, he has scarcely worked on the project, or talked about it. Instead, he and his partner Michael Wilford have been immersed, seven days a week, in a competition to design a new centre for Kyoto in Japan. They sent off their designs last week.

James Frazer Stirling, of Scottish-Irish parentage, is undeniably tough. Tough enough to sit out five years of debate over his design for the Mansion House offices and shops project. Tough enough to have gone without work in Britain for years before that in the 1970s, when his reputation here languished. Tough enough to have growled back at critics of his work, be they never so highly placed in Britain's hereditary aristocracy. Tough enough to stand aside from the fads of his own profession, from glass-box modernism to the frou-frou stylistic excesses of post-modernism.

He's 65, sports matching turquoise shirt and socks (a slight colour shift from the usual blue), and a healthily un-English tan. He displays his characteristic volatile mix of gruffness and geniality as we meet in his enormous first-floor office in Georgian Fitzroy Square. He is ready to talk, among much else, about the Palumbo scheme, which he calls simply Poultry, after the street it sits on.

His muscular new building, exploiting its wedge-shaped site toplay some of Stirling's favourite geometrical games with circles and triangles, will replace eight Grade Two listed buildings. Best known of these is the gothicky Mappin and Webb building of 1870 by John Belcher. But Belcher is a very humble onlooker at the stately dance of great buildings around this intersection - buildings by Dance, Soane, Tite, Lutyens, Hawksmoor and Wren. To live up to the wording of the government decision to let him go ahead, Stirling has to produce something that, in the words of the public inquiry inspector, "might just be a masterpiece".He seems unworried by the expecttations heaped upon him by his supporters, or by the ready-sharpened knives of his opponents.

"I always thought - right up to the last moment - that Poultry stood a 50-50 chance," he says. "I do regard this site as being very special, at this spider's web intersection surrounded by all those heroes like Lutyens and Hawksmoor and Dance. It's the quintessence of London."

The fact that the site is the quintessence of London was, of course, also a major plank of the conservation case against his scheme. Why should a fine group of listed buildings have to go at all? But Stirling's contribution, unique though it is, is positively reticent compared with Palumbo's previous dream for the site, a steel and glass tower dominating a new plaza, designed in 1967 by the modernist guru Ludwig Mies van der Rohe shortly before his death, and finally vetoed in 1985 after a public inquiry. Palumbo promptly appointed Stirling and abandoned the tower/plaza idea completely.

But Stirling has not forgotten it. He flicks through photos of his neighbouring buildings, pointing out how the compositions of Lutyens at the 1924 Midland Bank, or Dance at the 1734 Mansion House, can be explained as a series of separately readable pieces - base, pediment, rooftop pavilions and so on - and that his own building will be composed of individual pieces to achieve the same effect of human scale. "All of which contrasts with this," he says, pulling out a photo of the Mies tower with its sheer, unbroken facade. "I supported it, and I still would. I would have liked to see a Mies building in the City, but it's only one aspect of modern architecture."

This is the kind of attitude that gets the anti-Stirling brigade chewing the carpet. Where does this guy stand? If he's a modernist, why doesn't he design modern buildings? What's with all this historicist stuff? Why can't you pin him down?

Stirling has identifiable phases in his work - such as the redbrick-and-glass collection of university buildings at Leicester, Cambridge and Oxford in the 1960s, or the looser, more eclectic cultural buildings of the 1980s, such as the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart or the Performing Arts Center at Cornell University. But although he now prefers to break his big buildings down into smallish pieces and uses a different palette of materials and colours, the concerns of solid and void, of glass against masonry, persist. He never designed Miesian buildings when they were fashionable. And although partial to a historicist joke or two, he never became absorbed either by whimsical postmodernism or by out-and-out neo-classicism. And so he and Wilford work away, producing signature buildings that defy easy analysis.

Stirling, seldom happy in his rare interviews, is on his guard. "At a low journalistic level, surprise is often expressed that every building I do seems different from the previous one," he says, glint in eye. "Where is the Stirling style, where is the consistency, what will he do next? This is partly a fallacy of the modem movement. With Mies van der Rohe and those Bauhaus architects, you knew what you were getting. But you can cite just as many modern masters - Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and so on - whose work was always changing and moving on."

It is not so much that Stirling is unwilling to be categorised, as that the categories have to be invented to fit him, and it's hard work. The academic Charles Jencks once invented a style called "Free-style Classicism" and tried to lump Stirling into it, none too successfully. What is certain is that he is a master of the game of architecture. Like Lutyens or Hawksmoor he knows the rules and knows how to break them, with confidence. And whereas in the past he has not carried the public with him - as with his now demolished housing estate at Runcorn from the mid-l960s, or his trouble-prone Cambridge History Library from the same period - later projects such as Stuttgart or Cornell have been hugely popular. His most recent British building, the Clore Gallery at the Tate in London, has silently achieved public acceptance after its initial critical mauling. This is a joy still in store for the new National Gallery extension by the American postmodernist Robert Venturi, with its weak exterior now revealed to public gaze. Stirling would have contributed something beefily original to that site: his rejected designs for the extension are the first thing you see on the wall as you enter his office, mute testament to what might have been.

But then, Stirling's buildings are not what you expect to find any more in Britain, a country, that all but lost its architectural nerve in the 1980s. As with other talented British architects - a growing number, including youngsters like Ken Armstrong and Nigel Coates, as well as big names like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers - Stirling has found himself feted overseas and all but ignored back home. Of his current eight or nine projects under way, only one - for Palumbo - is in Britain. The gainers are: Germany, where Stirling is adding to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and building a headquarters for Braun at Melsungen; Spain, where he is building a large hotel and shopping complex in Seyille; Singapore, which will receive a polytechnic for 11,000 students; the University of California, with a science library; and Italy, with an art gallery in Milan and a bookshop at the Venice Biennale site, of which Stirling is particularly fond.

"The important people in other countries think that to have distinguished modern architecture is a real asset to them, personally," says Stirling. "All the important people in this country, with very few exceptions, think that to put down and deride modem architecture will somehow be an asset to them."

The Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, finished in 1984, is still Stirling's best-known work. When he won the competition to design it in 1977, there was suspicion of this strange, portly britische Architekt. There was unease at his classical references, which to some held associations with fascism. But as time went by, Stirling won them over. His inevitable blue shirt and scuffed suede shoes became objects of affection. Indeed, one of his blue shirts is buried in a "time capsule" beneath the gallery's foundations. And since the museum opened and rocketed Stuttgart to cultural fame, he has been invited back, to build music and theatre academies alongside. Together, his Stuttgart jobs form Stirling's largest piece of urban design to date. The central circular sunken courtyard of the gallery has become almost a trademark in other projects, not least at Poultry. And the sinuous, curving and tilting steel and glass wall of the Staatsgalerie has been imitated by architects everywhere.

Despite his fame, the architect admits he has a presentation problem. He has never produced luscious, crowd-pleasing perspective drawings. His chosen drawing method - axonometric views looking down from above and, more confusingly, up, as if from deep underground - are beautiful, but not instantly understandable except to a trained eye. He seldom makes models and these are usually crude. You have to wait until the building is built to get the flavour, which can't help to win clients. So how does Stirling get work? He shrugs. "Michael and I sit here and the phone rings. In a way we don't want to get any bigger than we are now. All told, about 50 people."

The Poultry project at least gives Stirling his chance for acceptance in Britain. Now he's won the battle to build it, he is looking at ways to incorporate parts of the decorative facades of the buildings he will demolish. But these minor modifications are the only changes he envisages, five years after he first put pen to paper.

Will we admire his street-level arcade of shops? Will we take the lifts to his circular roof garden, and follow the path through a sculpture court to the lookout tower overlooking Mansion House? If we do - and this building will have a far higher degree of public access than any other city office block - then we may learn to love tough old Jim and his theatrical gestures. He deserves it. As somebody once said: you don't have to be in the army to fight in the war.

June 1998 review of the completed building: http://www.hughpearman.com/articles/cwa4.htm


	James Stirling is unleashed on London, 1991 © Hugh Pearman. Published in The Sunday Times, 14 April 1991, as "Stirling's rising value". Author's note, 2005: this was not an easy interview. Though Stirling was on gruffly genial form, like everyone else I was more than a little in awe of him. With Jim you were dealing with a one-off. However, he also had a mischievous sense of humour. Years previously, when I had been an editor on the magazine Building Design, Jim had sent me a press cutting from something like the Runcorn Gazette. A man living on his famous (now long since demolished) Runcorn housing estate with its big circular windows had been arrested for exposing himself to a busload of nurses which passed his house every morning. One aesthetically-aware nurse noted that, thus framed, he looked like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. But what tickled Jim was the man's defence in court. Given such windows, what else could he do, he asked, claiming that his misdeed was the architect's fault. Jim insisted we publish this. Always conscious of his weight, Jim also hated being photographed. Luckily the man who came to do it was the elegant Michael Ward, one of the great chroniclers of the Swinging Sixties, by then in his last few years on The Sunday Times. Michael captured the paradox of Jim: the burly hand balancing the delicate pencil. Sir James Stirling died unexpectedly in 1992 because of the incompetence of an anaesthetist. Later the Stirling Prize for architecture was established in his honour. When this building - Number One Poultry, in the City of London - was finally completed in 1998, I admired it but - on reading my review of the time - I see I could not bring myself to like it. On seeing it today, I have no such doubts. It has weathered well, it is London's best and most singular post-modern building, it is positively magnificent. Suddenly and unexpectedly, James Stirling starts talking about fighting in the second world war. Nothing about parachuting into Normandy on D-day (which he did). Nothing about being wounded in action twice (which he was). No, the most private of our high-profile master architects is talking about European culture and not feeling English. "I was in the bloody army," he says. "I was incredibly young. . . 17, 18. . . in the last two years of the war. So I got involved in a very traumatic way with the European problem, with European concerns, when I was that young. Maybe I've never thought of myself as being anything other than European." There is a pause. Stirling adds: "I'm also from Liverpool. Not a Londoner, not a southerner, so I don't feel influenced by that." Europe - particularly Germany - has paid Stirling back handsomely since. The people he employs in his offices in Berlin and Stuttgart outnumber the contingent in London where, for all his northern disparagement, he has lived and worked for decades. Things have changed a little, however. He is finally able to build for his client Peter Palumbo, the property developer and now Arts Council chairman, right at the heart of the City at Mansion House. Typically, in the month since he learned of Palumbo's already legendary victory over the massed forces of conservation, he has scarcely worked on the project, or talked about it. Instead, he and his partner Michael Wilford have been immersed, seven days a week, in a competition to design a new centre for Kyoto in Japan. They sent off their designs last week. James Frazer Stirling, of Scottish-Irish parentage, is undeniably tough. Tough enough to sit out five years of debate over his design for the Mansion House offices and shops project. Tough enough to have gone without work in Britain for years before that in the 1970s, when his reputation here languished. Tough enough to have growled back at critics of his work, be they never so highly placed in Britain's hereditary aristocracy. Tough enough to stand aside from the fads of his own profession, from glass-box modernism to the frou-frou stylistic excesses of post-modernism. He's 65, sports matching turquoise shirt and socks (a slight colour shift from the usual blue), and a healthily un-English tan. He displays his characteristic volatile mix of gruffness and geniality as we meet in his enormous first-floor office in Georgian Fitzroy Square. He is ready to talk, among much else, about the Palumbo scheme, which he calls simply Poultry, after the street it sits on. His muscular new building, exploiting its wedge-shaped site toplay some of Stirling's favourite geometrical games with circles and triangles, will replace eight Grade Two listed buildings. Best known of these is the gothicky Mappin and Webb building of 1870 by John Belcher. But Belcher is a very humble onlooker at the stately dance of great buildings around this intersection - buildings by Dance, Soane, Tite, Lutyens, Hawksmoor and Wren. To live up to the wording of the government decision to let him go ahead, Stirling has to produce something that, in the words of the public inquiry inspector, "might just be a masterpiece".He seems unworried by the expecttations heaped upon him by his supporters, or by the ready-sharpened knives of his opponents. "I always thought - right up to the last moment - that Poultry stood a 50-50 chance," he says. "I do regard this site as being very special, at this spider's web intersection surrounded by all those heroes like Lutyens and Hawksmoor and Dance. It's the quintessence of London." The fact that the site is the quintessence of London was, of course, also a major plank of the conservation case against his scheme. Why should a fine group of listed buildings have to go at all? But Stirling's contribution, unique though it is, is positively reticent compared with Palumbo's previous dream for the site, a steel and glass tower dominating a new plaza, designed in 1967 by the modernist guru Ludwig Mies van der Rohe shortly before his death, and finally vetoed in 1985 after a public inquiry. Palumbo promptly appointed Stirling and abandoned the tower/plaza idea completely. But Stirling has not forgotten it. He flicks through photos of his neighbouring buildings, pointing out how the compositions of Lutyens at the 1924 Midland Bank, or Dance at the 1734 Mansion House, can be explained as a series of separately readable pieces - base, pediment, rooftop pavilions and so on - and that his own building will be composed of individual pieces to achieve the same effect of human scale. "All of which contrasts with this," he says, pulling out a photo of the Mies tower with its sheer, unbroken facade. "I supported it, and I still would. I would have liked to see a Mies building in the City, but it's only one aspect of modern architecture." This is the kind of attitude that gets the anti-Stirling brigade chewing the carpet. Where does this guy stand? If he's a modernist, why doesn't he design modern buildings? What's with all this historicist stuff? Why can't you pin him down? Stirling has identifiable phases in his work - such as the redbrick-and-glass collection of university buildings at Leicester, Cambridge and Oxford in the 1960s, or the looser, more eclectic cultural buildings of the 1980s, such as the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart or the Performing Arts Center at Cornell University. But although he now prefers to break his big buildings down into smallish pieces and uses a different palette of materials and colours, the concerns of solid and void, of glass against masonry, persist. He never designed Miesian buildings when they were fashionable. And although partial to a historicist joke or two, he never became absorbed either by whimsical postmodernism or by out-and-out neo-classicism. And so he and Wilford work away, producing signature buildings that defy easy analysis. Stirling, seldom happy in his rare interviews, is on his guard. "At a low journalistic level, surprise is often expressed that every building I do seems different from the previous one," he says, glint in eye. "Where is the Stirling style, where is the consistency, what will he do next? This is partly a fallacy of the modem movement. With Mies van der Rohe and those Bauhaus architects, you knew what you were getting. But you can cite just as many modern masters - Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and so on - whose work was always changing and moving on." It is not so much that Stirling is unwilling to be categorised, as that the categories have to be invented to fit him, and it's hard work. The academic Charles Jencks once invented a style called "Free-style Classicism" and tried to lump Stirling into it, none too successfully. What is certain is that he is a master of the game of architecture. Like Lutyens or Hawksmoor he knows the rules and knows how to break them, with confidence. And whereas in the past he has not carried the public with him - as with his now demolished housing estate at Runcorn from the mid-l960s, or his trouble-prone Cambridge History Library from the same period - later projects such as Stuttgart or Cornell have been hugely popular. His most recent British building, the Clore Gallery at the Tate in London, has silently achieved public acceptance after its initial critical mauling. This is a joy still in store for the new National Gallery extension by the American postmodernist Robert Venturi, with its weak exterior now revealed to public gaze. Stirling would have contributed something beefily original to that site: his rejected designs for the extension are the first thing you see on the wall as you enter his office, mute testament to what might have been. But then, Stirling's buildings are not what you expect to find any more in Britain, a country, that all but lost its architectural nerve in the 1980s. As with other talented British architects - a growing number, including youngsters like Ken Armstrong and Nigel Coates, as well as big names like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers - Stirling has found himself feted overseas and all but ignored back home. Of his current eight or nine projects under way, only one - for Palumbo - is in Britain. The gainers are: Germany, where Stirling is adding to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and building a headquarters for Braun at Melsungen; Spain, where he is building a large hotel and shopping complex in Seyille; Singapore, which will receive a polytechnic for 11,000 students; the University of California, with a science library; and Italy, with an art gallery in Milan and a bookshop at the Venice Biennale site, of which Stirling is particularly fond. "The important people in other countries think that to have distinguished modern architecture is a real asset to them, personally," says Stirling. "All the important people in this country, with very few exceptions, think that to put down and deride modem architecture will somehow be an asset to them." The Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, finished in 1984, is still Stirling's best-known work. When he won the competition to design it in 1977, there was suspicion of this strange, portly britische Architekt. There was unease at his classical references, which to some held associations with fascism. But as time went by, Stirling won them over. His inevitable blue shirt and scuffed suede shoes became objects of affection. Indeed, one of his blue shirts is buried in a "time capsule" beneath the gallery's foundations. And since the museum opened and rocketed Stuttgart to cultural fame, he has been invited back, to build music and theatre academies alongside. Together, his Stuttgart jobs form Stirling's largest piece of urban design to date. The central circular sunken courtyard of the gallery has become almost a trademark in other projects, not least at Poultry. And the sinuous, curving and tilting steel and glass wall of the Staatsgalerie has been imitated by architects everywhere. Despite his fame, the architect admits he has a presentation problem. He has never produced luscious, crowd-pleasing perspective drawings. His chosen drawing method - axonometric views looking down from above and, more confusingly, up, as if from deep underground - are beautiful, but not instantly understandable except to a trained eye. He seldom makes models and these are usually crude. You have to wait until the building is built to get the flavour, which can't help to win clients. So how does Stirling get work? He shrugs. "Michael and I sit here and the phone rings. In a way we don't want to get any bigger than we are now. All told, about 50 people." The Poultry project at least gives Stirling his chance for acceptance in Britain. Now he's won the battle to build it, he is looking at ways to incorporate parts of the decorative facades of the buildings he will demolish. But these minor modifications are the only changes he envisages, five years after he first put pen to paper. Will we admire his street-level arcade of shops? Will we take the lifts to his circular roof garden, and follow the path through a sculpture court to the lookout tower overlooking Mansion House? If we do - and this building will have a far higher degree of public access than any other city office block - then we may learn to love tough old Jim and his theatrical gestures. He deserves it. As somebody once said: you don't have to be in the army to fight in the war. June 1998 review of the completed building: http://www.hughpearman.com/articles/cwa4.htm © Copyright 1998-2009 Hugh Pearman For text reproduction rights to Sunday Times articles, contact The Sunday Times Syndication Website http://www.hughpearman.com Website developed by Archiseek.com.