Bryan Appleyard
Is He A Genius?
Big Jim: The Life And Work of James Stirling
By Mark Girouard
Chatto & Windus 400pp £25 order from our bookshop
Sir James Stirling was and still is the central figure in postwar British and possibly world architecture. He was the godfather to the high-tech generation of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster as well as to their successors. And, globally, he is the most influential figure in 'third-generation modernism'.
The original modernist pioneers – Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright – were replaced, in the Thirties, by a huge number of consolidators like Walter Gropius. Then there was a hiatus, which only really ended with Stirling's Leicester University Engineering Building in 1960. This building gave
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