Stirling's Rational facade: self-division within the reading of Garches and Jaoul

In 1984 Colin Rowe was finally persuaded to write an introduction for a book on the work of James Stirling. In his text, Rowe claimed that he had previously resisted a similar invitation in 1973, due in part to an inability at that time to account for Stirling's lack of interest in facades. He wrote: ‘According to my reading, these [Le Corbusier's Villa Schwob and Garches] were all masters of the vertical surface; and clearly, it must have been the relative absence of this concern in Stirling which arrested my writing in 1973 and which remains my reservation about Stuttgart’. For Rowe, the missing facade of Stirling's museum extension to the Staatsgalerie stood metonymically for the absence of Stirling's visible engagement with the articulation of an ideal world, because the facade was ‘the existential interface between eye and idea’. Without a facade Rowe could not be sure that Stirling adhered to the sort of idealism that satisfied his own architectural and philosophical concerns.