Jim Stirling’s Architecture - ACE036.7

The Faculty of Engineering building at Leicester University (1959), designed and built in partnership with James Gowan. Commentary quotes a description of the building as "the most important building in post-war Europe", and talks about the construction as "romantic" and echoing Victorian steel and glass railway stations, thus linking Stirling with "the 19th century industrial aesthetic". Stirling’s VO commenting on this. Nineteenth-century dockside warehouses, one of which has a sliding metal gate, and other related buildings. Stirling’s VO suggesting that the components of modern buildings can "suppress the hand of the people" who make them. Details of the buildings considered above. Commentary describes Stirling as a romantic, but "a maverick cowboy architect", who thinks of his buildings as toys, individual and specific to the brief, the client and the user. Commentary suggests that Stirling’s work is a "prototype architecture for a new industrial civilisation which is not quite here yet". Credits.