Article An Archaeology of Fragments: James Stirling's Andrew Melville Hall McEwan, Cameron Available at http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/25167/ McEwan, Cameron ORCID: 0000-0002-0683-1708 (2014) An Archaeology of Fragments: James Stirling's Andrew Melville Hall. Outsiders: Building Scotland . pp. 4-11. It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. For more information about UCLan’s research in this area go to http://www.uclan.ac.uk/researchgroups/ and search for <name of research Group>. For information about Research generally at UCLan please go to http://www.uclan.ac.uk/research/ All outputs in CLoK are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including Copyright law. Copyright, IPR and Moral Rights for the works on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the policies page. CLoK Central Lancashire online Knowledge www.clok.uclan.ac.uk Scotland + Venice OUTSIDERS PAST + FUTURE OUTSIDERS is credited to the following contributors and guests: Samuel Penn Lecturer in Architecture, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University, AE Foundation Co- founder and Director Dr. Cameron McEwan Lecturer in History and Theory of the City, Architectural Design Tutor, AE Foundation Associate Penny Lewis Lecturer in Architectural History, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University, AE Foundation Co-founder and Director Hugh Lawson Student of Architecture, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University Volha Druhakova Student of Architecture, Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University Emmanuel Petit Associate Professor at Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, USA, Partner at Jean Petit Architectes, Luxembourg Sven-Olov Wallenstein Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden, Editor in Chief of Site Magazine Dirk van den Heuvel Associate Professor at TU Delft Department of Architecture, Netherlands , Editor of DASH (NAi publishers) and the on-line journal Footprint We would like to thank Fergus Denoon, Michael Wolchover - A Slight Shift, Norma Shewan, Derry Menzies Robertson and John Barber. Thanks also to Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, and to Robert Gordon University Archives. 4 OUTSIDERS PAST + FUTURE 5 Standing in the shadow of Modern masters such conceptual and formal point of view. AN as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Frank In the text that follows I will first rehearse Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the generation that Stirling’s formative influences and put forward graduated from architecture schools in the extended a close reading of his Andrew Melville Hall as a ARCHAEOLOGY decade after World War II – Robert Venturi, Oswald transitional work in Stirling’s oeuvre that points Mathias Ungers, Aldo Rossi, James Stirling to name toward the spatial complexity of his museum and a few – were critical of the social and urban effects gallery projects of later years. My discussion will OF FRAGMENTS of Modern architecture. Yet they were reluctant to be situated by recalling a selection of significant abandon Modernism altogether. Instead, they put moments in architectural debate during the 1950s forward a critique of Modern architecture and in and 1960s from Banham to Eisenman and Ungers doing so searched for the core principles of the then to Rossi and Tafuri. The aim of this essay is to discipline. Architects and theorists inquired into first theorise an archaeology of fragments in relation architectural and cultural questions such as the to a selection of Stirling’s works; and second, ANDREW MELVILLE HALL following: how can tradition and technology be provide a brief account of how stimulating and reconciled? How do the arts and architecture relate productive a period this was for architecture with JAMES STIRLING to everyday life? What is the role of the architect in the view that doing so brings the present state of 1968 the social struggle of the city? architectural production into sharp relief. These questions were underpinned by Stirling was born in Glasgow. His mother was a search for an architectural language that might a school teacher and his father, a ship’s engineer. extend, overcome or break free of Modernism. The family moved to Liverpool where James Stirling On one hand there was a tendency to extend spent his childhood and youth, before enlisting in TEXT BY CAMERON MCEWAN the technological and functionalist approach of the army in 1942, aged eighteen. He was recruited Modernism as is evident in projects such as Kenzo into the Black Watch and trained in Perth, Scotland. Tange’s Tokyo Bay proposal (1959) or the buildings In the same barrack-room, Stirling became friends of Paul Rudolph in America. On the other hand there with his future architectural mentor Colin Rowe, was an approach that rejected Modernism and put then moved to the Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow in forward a stylistic mimesis of historical architectural June 1943. We can say that Stirling’s internal visual- form exemplified in BBPRs Torre Velasca tower in formal criticality developed from his exposure to Milan (1956-58) or the “Townscape” aesthetic in the industrial forms that were revealed during train Britain. James Stirling questioned both of these journeys from Glasgow to Liverpool and from his tendencies. experience serving abroad in the army. Stirling was James Frazer Stirling (1924-92) was one injured in combat as a paratrooper in 1944 and of the preeminent architects of the post World released from service in April 1946. In the following War II generation – in Europe and Internationally – September he started his architectural training at and recipient of prestigious architectural awards Liverpool. including the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (1980), the A formative influence at Liverpool was Pritzker Architecture Prize (1981), and Japan’s Rowe who was Stirling’s thesis tutor. In 1947 Rowe Praemium Imperiale (1990). Stirling’s work – which published “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,” has been recently reassessed by Anthony Vidler, which compared Andrea Palladio and Le Corbusier. Mark Crinson, Emmanuel Petit, and Amanda It combined formal analysis with a Wittkowerian Reeser Lawrence – was subject to critique by many interest in Palladio’s proportional system to of the leading architectural thinkers of the time compare Palladio’s Villa Malcontenta (c1550) and including Manfredo Tafuri, Peter Eisenman, John Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein (1927). Rowe’s polemic Summerson, Kenneth Frampton, Joseph Rykwert was for Le Corbusier to value the Classical tradition and Alvin Boyarsky. These critics put forward various above his Cubist disposition. With this proposition, descriptions of Stirling’s work, from “violent” and Rowe – like Emil Kaufmann’s “from Ledoux to “apocalyptic” as Boyarsky said, to “playful” as Le Corbusier” – contributed to the historicising Summerson commented. Eisenman read Stirling’s of Modern architecture. In another early essay, work as a dual critique of Modernist abstraction “Mannerism and Modern Architecture,” Rowe and post-Modern material presence. For Tafuri, discussed the relations between Mannerist and the architecture of Stirling was an “archaeology of Modernist conceptions of space. The key example fragments.” was Le Corbusier’s Villa Schwob (1916), in which The notion of an “archaeology of Rowe comments that the blank square panel on the fragments” frames the following discussion. On entrance façade disrupts the surrounding elements one hand an archaeology of fragments refers – oval windows, columns, canopy, the curved to a conceptual framework for the selection volumes of the house beyond – paralleling the and extraction of a fragment – an abstract Mannerist effects of complexity and ambiguity. We or representational form – from the history of can say that the thinking inherent to these essays architecture and the city, but more broadly the manifests in Rowe’s teaching. history of forms in general. On the other hand Robert Maxwell has pointed out that the notion refers to a formal principle for the Rowe’s teaching method encouraged an “eclectic” composition, manipulation and transformation of interest in architectural history so that students buildings as distinct parts through operations such could “crib” ideas. Rowe, as Maxwell writes, “taught as duplication, repetition, rotation, oppositions his students to cultivate visual acumen, endlessly of scale, form, space, interior and exterior. It is looking – not only at photographs of buildings, but important to recognise in both cases an archaeology also at the buildings themselves – as evidence of fragments is linked with the historical evolution always accessible, always under our eyes, to be of formal knowledge in architecture. Furthermore it scrutinized for the secrets it contained.” Hence, is worth pointing out that the category of fragment Rowe stimulated Stirling’s interest in architecture’s discussed here does not refer to a romantic vision historical-formal condition and taught him to be of architecture as a ruin, nor of material phenomena. continuously visually aware. Stirling engaged in Rather the fragment is understood from a the search for precedents, finding the conceptual 6 OUTSIDERS PAST + FUTURE 7 8 OUTSIDERS principles – the “secrets” – that underline them by In essence those involved in the being able to see – as Rowe