Spens on Stirling – too loyal

Until about 1974, James Stirling's work subverted and redefined the Modernist canon. Michael Spens is deeply sympathetic to Stirling and brilliantly analyzes some of the authentic masterpieces from that time, particularly Olivetti Haslemere and the St Andrews residential accommodation (arq5/4, pp 333–353). Accurately, he identifies the unbuilt St Andrews Arts Centre (1974) as the point where things began to change. After that, influenced by Werner Kreis, Léon Krier and others (and of course Colin Rowe), Stirling began to explore an exciting amalgam of the abstract and the figurative, marrying his previously intransigent Modernism to a representational Neo-Classical idiom.