I was lecturing on Jim Stirling today and found myself showing amazing enthusiasm for the early work, which appears to me so ballsy and 'jimcrack' at the same time that it's hard to imagine how it got built at all (for it certainly wouldn't be built now). The trilogy; Leicester Engineering, Cambridge History Faculty, Oxford Foley building are simply a catalogue of disasters that remind me happily of Dads Army. They are appropriate C20th ruins. It all feels as if it's been knocked out in some old blokes shed with a lot of enthusiasm for some vague possibilities. Big Jim was in to beer, birds, pies, jazz and some notion of architecture now lost on us, and it was with great sentiment that I found myself describing his increasingly eccentric moves with more and more respect.
Watch out, I just received, via Amazon, a very rare book on Belgian crazy Lucian Kroll, and I like the look of it.
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