Review: Notes from the Archive: James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher; An Architect's Legacy; James Stirling's Students at Yale, 1959–83

Abstract

The first objects you encounter when entering the exhibition Notes from the Archive: James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher are two chairs that once sat in Stirling's living room—the iconic Grand Confort chair in tubular steel and black leather, designed by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand in 1929, and the solid wood English Side Chair, ca. 1802–10, from a design by Thomas Hope.1 In choosing to open the show with this pair of chairs, Anthony Vidler, the show's curator, is not concerned simply with evoking conversations that may or may not have occurred in them, or in conjuring up images of the seated, portly, figure of Stirling himself (though one can't help but picture him there—his purple socks peaking out beneath his trousers) or even in highlighting Stirling's well-known role as a collector (which, as Stirling's teacher and friend Colin Rowe once noted, had a profound influence on his architecture). Instead, the chairs succinctly symbolize the most consistent and defining preoccupation of Stirling's career—the