Stirling: Pre-Post Modern

So.  Post Modernism is back.

I'd actually meant to blog about the PoMo extensions to the Tate on Millbank and the National Gallery up at Trafalgar Square.  It occurred to me that I've lived within ten minutes walk of the Tate for about three years, yet can only think of a couple of times that I've bothered to go in (#philistine).  Likewise, I reckon I've been into the James-Stirling-designed extension, the Clore Gallery, but really can't remember much about it.

But whilst Googling the Clore, I came across a Gurniad aticle which noted that another, much earlier, Stirling building was just 15 minutes' bike ride away.  So, I thought I'd have a look at that, as a warm-up up the Tate.

Hiding near Camberwell, the dining and assembly hall for Brunswick Park School was designed in the late fifties, with Stirling's then-partner, James Gowan.  It's made up of three prism-like blocks of glass and light brick, with the fourth corner of the site marked by a chimney (which is presumably located above the kitchens).

There's a really strong 45 degree axonometry here.  You can see the graph paper's impact on the design.  The grass verge rises steeply to the perpendicular curtain wall of glass, which then falls back to the raised ground level.  The geometry is continued by the triangles of internal beams.  This drawing captures the whole effect perfectly.

Taken from Flikr

I find it hard to imagine how space-age and modern the Stirling building must have looked to late-50's eyes.  Whilst looking a bit shabby now, this was a strikingly different architecture to the rather sensible Victorian pile of the school's main building.

Surprisingly sympathetic UPVC windows.

Without getting inside the dining hall, there 's not much more to say about it.  Other than the way that the axonometric angles and glass of the Brunswick building foreshadow Stirling's later, larger, red-tiled and better-known works at Leicester, Cambridge and Oxford Universities.

The Leicester University engineering faculty building, 1959-63.

Looking something like a space rocket on a launch pad.

The Cambridge University history faculty building, designed 1963.

Oxford's The Queen's College's Florey building, looking like a Space Invader, designed 1968.

There's clearly quite a lot of form-over-function these red-tile-and-glass shapes (the wings of the Cambridge building apparently hinting at an open book, from which knowledge is pouring out).  I wonder how that bodes for an art gallery.

But the above buildings were a couple of decades before Sitrling's Post-Modernist Clore gallery...  So I shall go and look at that.