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Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling
"A remarkable book... A work of social as much as architectural history... A riveting and illuminating biography." - Spectator"What makes Girouard a good biographer is that he allows Jim's swashbuckling story to tell itself. And with magnificent restraint, he keeps the buildings as far in the background as they can be in the life of an architect...A superb book." - GuardianFrom the Trade Paperback edition.
- GenresArchitecture
400 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
About the author
Mark Girouard
56 books15 followersMark Girouard FSA was a British architectural historian who was an authority on the country house, and Elizabethan and Victorian architecture.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 8, 2023
This book has a reputation amongst architects of being salacious and dirt-dishing on Stirling's wild behaviour – having read it, it's just that he was a bit of a shagger and got up to some pissed silliness when younger. Oh well. However, the book is great for understanding one of the most talented of the last century's architects, who are a strange bunch, definitely artists but of a peculiar sort. The way in which the office was run, the way in which projects were designed really comes to life, but so does the fact that despite being one of the most 'famous' architects in the world, his life was that of a fairly nondescript bourgeois… but then what might one expect?
December 27, 2022
James Stirling may have been careless in matters of dress and body odour as Mark Girouard reminds us, but being a bit smelly, I’m afraid, tends to be characteristic of much that is best in English culture. Beyond these superficialities, Stirling was a sincere architect whose sense of mission as the leading renewer of modernism never left him, even when the way led through the turgidity of postmodernism. By the time of his death he was well beyond that - as his last projects show: Singapore, Salford, Tokyo, Channel 4, Kyoto and of course the Venice Bookshop. To be willing to lose one’s way as he did, be deeply misunderstood and to conduct it all in the full public gaze without being distracted is surely the mark of a strong man. Tragically, he died in full flight without finishing what he was going to say, leaving much confusion and misunderstanding.
Girouard’s biography recounts this long and somewhat harrowing story in the course of which, unfortunately, any sense of Stirling’s deeper purpose tends to become obfuscated by too much insistence on his professional and human shortcomings, though these were no worse than anyone else’s. Albeit with perhaps not consciously malevolent intentions, Girouard lends credence to the idea that Stirling’s work is of dubious worth; an attitude that allows dreadful things to happen, as we recently saw with the demolition of some of his most interesting work at the Liverpool Tate.
Stirling’s achievement was to tear modern architecture away from its earliest theoretical positions, making possible an erudite contemporary architecture enriched by constantly renewed terms of reference. By widening and deepening modernism’s scope he helped save it from atrophy, and if we now seem to have entered a florid, pluralistic phase, it was Stirling more than any other who made this possible. No wonder architects like Gehry, Hollein, and Isozaki considered him a master and were always anxious to talk to him.
Girouard’s tale begins extremely well with an exciting description of the pre-swinging London of the Fifties, out of which young Stirling emerged, destined as he knew to revolutionise the whole of architecture. It was a time when everybody slept with anybody, no-one had any cash, and intense discussions took place about where architecture was going. Girouard’s account of this is thrilling and the names he mentions are a Who’s Who of the generation that realised, horrified, that Le Corbusier was not infallible. Stirling’s own two essays in the Architectural Review are the most coruscating critique of Corbu that has ever been written.
Enter Colin Rowe, that most cultivated and unorthodox of modernism’s new theoreticians, who taught Stirling to plunder history without mercy. Breaking through the conventions Stirling produced the most courageous building of the age, the Leicester Engineering Building. Sensitive as always to the cultural mood around him, by a supreme act of boldness he showed how to deconstruct and weaken Modernism’s certainties, allowing new influences to flow in, making the whole thing unstable and open.
When Stirling went to Yale in 1959, the Americans began to fawn over him, as they do, and before long the sincere Liverpudlian pushing the edges of the envelope became a self-conscious superstar half-paralysed by fame. He began to ask “will they like this? What will they think?” - not at all what he would have worried about as a younger man. But at the end, with some prodding from loyal friends (your reviewer one of them) he was moving towards the new statement everyone expected. As Kenneth Frampton wrote in AA Files, the Venice Bookshop seemed to point towards a new primitivism and as we know, Stirling made a pilgrimage with his lover Marlies Hentrup to see the Dutch architect-monk Dom Van Der Laan, and was much affected by it.
The trouble with a book like this is that it creates the impression that Stirling was the only man whose private life was messy, and the only architect whose buildings had defects. Would that all the world’s defective buildings could be as great as Stirling’s! But Girouard seems keen not to miss an opportunity to dwell on every leak, every contretemps with clients, as though these matters were not the normal currency of every architect’s work.
Leicester was the breakthrough that made possible High Tech, PoMo, De-con, and now Jungian Folksy Biotech. That is the measure of what Stirling achieved and it’s a pity Girouard devotes the whole second half of his book to discussing matters that represent the lowest common denominator of public (mis)understanding.
Girouard’s biography recounts this long and somewhat harrowing story in the course of which, unfortunately, any sense of Stirling’s deeper purpose tends to become obfuscated by too much insistence on his professional and human shortcomings, though these were no worse than anyone else’s. Albeit with perhaps not consciously malevolent intentions, Girouard lends credence to the idea that Stirling’s work is of dubious worth; an attitude that allows dreadful things to happen, as we recently saw with the demolition of some of his most interesting work at the Liverpool Tate.
Stirling’s achievement was to tear modern architecture away from its earliest theoretical positions, making possible an erudite contemporary architecture enriched by constantly renewed terms of reference. By widening and deepening modernism’s scope he helped save it from atrophy, and if we now seem to have entered a florid, pluralistic phase, it was Stirling more than any other who made this possible. No wonder architects like Gehry, Hollein, and Isozaki considered him a master and were always anxious to talk to him.
Girouard’s tale begins extremely well with an exciting description of the pre-swinging London of the Fifties, out of which young Stirling emerged, destined as he knew to revolutionise the whole of architecture. It was a time when everybody slept with anybody, no-one had any cash, and intense discussions took place about where architecture was going. Girouard’s account of this is thrilling and the names he mentions are a Who’s Who of the generation that realised, horrified, that Le Corbusier was not infallible. Stirling’s own two essays in the Architectural Review are the most coruscating critique of Corbu that has ever been written.
Enter Colin Rowe, that most cultivated and unorthodox of modernism’s new theoreticians, who taught Stirling to plunder history without mercy. Breaking through the conventions Stirling produced the most courageous building of the age, the Leicester Engineering Building. Sensitive as always to the cultural mood around him, by a supreme act of boldness he showed how to deconstruct and weaken Modernism’s certainties, allowing new influences to flow in, making the whole thing unstable and open.
When Stirling went to Yale in 1959, the Americans began to fawn over him, as they do, and before long the sincere Liverpudlian pushing the edges of the envelope became a self-conscious superstar half-paralysed by fame. He began to ask “will they like this? What will they think?” - not at all what he would have worried about as a younger man. But at the end, with some prodding from loyal friends (your reviewer one of them) he was moving towards the new statement everyone expected. As Kenneth Frampton wrote in AA Files, the Venice Bookshop seemed to point towards a new primitivism and as we know, Stirling made a pilgrimage with his lover Marlies Hentrup to see the Dutch architect-monk Dom Van Der Laan, and was much affected by it.
The trouble with a book like this is that it creates the impression that Stirling was the only man whose private life was messy, and the only architect whose buildings had defects. Would that all the world’s defective buildings could be as great as Stirling’s! But Girouard seems keen not to miss an opportunity to dwell on every leak, every contretemps with clients, as though these matters were not the normal currency of every architect’s work.
Leicester was the breakthrough that made possible High Tech, PoMo, De-con, and now Jungian Folksy Biotech. That is the measure of what Stirling achieved and it’s a pity Girouard devotes the whole second half of his book to discussing matters that represent the lowest common denominator of public (mis)understanding.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews