Stirling and Gowan
Subtitle: architecture from austerity to affluence
By: Mark Crinson
Publisher: Yale University Press; Paul Mellon Centre
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New Haven [Conn.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 352
ISBN-13: 9780300177282
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; Architecture; History
Other titles: Architecture from austerity to affluence
Description: James Stirling (1924-1992) is acclaimed as the most influential and controversial modern British architect. His partnership with James Gowan (b. 1923) between 1956 and 1963 put postwar British architecture on the international map, and their Leicester University Engineering Building became an iconic monument for a new kind of modernism. Mark Crinson's book is the most thoroughly researched study of Stirling and Gowan's partnership to date. Based on extensive interviews and archival research, Crinson argues that their work was the product of two equally creative partners whose different concerns produced a dynamic aesthetic. He gives an in-depth account of their training and early careers, their relation to key architects and movements of the time, and the commissioning, design, and construction of their work. This critical reassessment dispels previous myths and inaccuracies regarding their partnership and analyzes how ideas about mannerism, modernism, nostalgia, community, consumerism, Victorian cities, and institutional typologies influenced their designs. Stirling and Gowan positions their avant-garde creations within a larger context as creative responses to Britain's postwar deindustrialization and the shift from austerity to affluence.
Notes: "Originally published as Volume 34, Issue 4 of Art History"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Formulas, free plans, and a Piranesian city; title: Third generation; title: Junk, bunk, and tomorrow; title: The cube and the pile-up; title: The uses of nostalgia; title: The mechanical hobgoblin; title: Aftermath.