James Stirling Biography, Buildings and Best Books

James Stirling (1926-1992) was a British architect and one of the most inventive of his generation. With James Gowan he designed the Leicester Engineering Building, a landmark of postwar British architecture, and with Michael Wilford the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, a key work of postmodernism. He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1981 and was knighted shortly before his death in 1992.

Glasgow, Liverpool and London

Stirling was born in Glasgow in 1926 and grew up in Liverpool. After serving as a paratrooper in the Second World War he studied at the Liverpool School of Architecture, graduating in 1950, and moved to London, where he worked for Lyons, Israel and Ellis and joined the debates of the Independent Group and the young British avant-garde.

Stirling and Gowan

In 1956 he formed a partnership with James Gowan. Their flats at Ham Common (1958) drew on Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul, and the Leicester University Engineering Building (1963), with its angled towers, red tiles and crystalline glass roofs, became one of the most celebrated British buildings of its time.

Cambridge, Oxford and the red trilogy

Working alone after 1963, Stirling completed the History Faculty Library at Cambridge (1968) and the Florey Building at Queen’s College, Oxford (1971). Together with Leicester, these brick and glass buildings are often called his “red trilogy”. In 1971 he took Michael Wilford into partnership.

Stuttgart, London and the Pritzker Prize

From the late 1970s Stirling and Wilford turned to a richer, more historical architecture. The Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart (1984), with its ramps, rotunda and bright green handrails, became an icon of postmodernism, followed by the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain (1987), Tate Liverpool (1988) and the Electa Bookshop at the Venice Biennale gardens (1991). He received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1980 and the Pritzker Prize in 1981, and died in London in 1992.