Picturesque and Intransigent: ‘Creative Tension’ and Collaboration in the Early House Projects of Stirling and Gowan

Abstract

Between 1956 and 1963 James Stirling and James Gowan created a seminal body of work, one that seemed to challenge the overly-institutionalized state of contemporary modernism, and even to point the way to other alternatives beyond it. Their buildings were quasi-brutalist and pre-postmodern, startlingly original in the context of the worthy architecture of the welfare state, yet able to draw on inter-war forms of continental modernism as well as the architecture of the industrial city. The notoriously fractious relationship between the partners was an important factor in this achievement. Mark Girouard has used the term ‘creative tension’ to describe this relationship, deriving it from an interview with Michael Wilford, who worked as an architectural assistant in the partnership’s last years and later (in 1971) himself became Stirling’s partner. This formulation may well relate to a colourful and discordant new architectural identity — a sometimes playful, sometimes edgy combination of angry young men, teddy boy architects and awkward, blunt provincials shaking up the big city — emerging in contrast to the anonymous public architect of the time. Girouard uses ‘creative tension’ to label a photograph of Stirling and Gowan (Fig. 1): Stirling leans easily to the side looking wryly camerawards, while Gowan, absorbed and tense around the mouth, looks down and outwards to the right; between the two is a gap measured out by the line of columns seen behind them. The contrast with a photograph reproduced later in the same book, of Stirling and Wilford sitting companionably across a table, seems to speak for itself.