1 ‘The tension was creative’: Michael Wilford quoted in Girouard, Mark, Big Jim – The Life and Work of James Stirling (London, 2000), p. 107.Google Scholar

2 ‘Ernesto Rogers referred in an article to Stirling and Gowan as the “teddy boys of English architecture”, to which Stirling responded by sending Ernesto a neatly-packed, rusty cut-throat razor’: Malcolm Higgs, ‘James “Bad Boy” Stirling: The Early Years’, unpublished lecture given to the Twentieth Century Society, 27 November 2003.

3 Substantiating its importance, this later photograph also appears as the final image in Stirling, James, Wilford, Michael and Partners, , Buildings and Projects 1975–1992 (London, 1994), p. 308.Google Scholar

4 On this Act, see Crinson, Mark and Lubbock, Jules, Architecture – Art or Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain (Manchester, 1994), pp. 123–25.Google Scholar

5 This, of course, is a common trope in architectural history. I like the entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Irish Architects: Charles Lanyon was ‘good looking, suave, extrovert, the supreme organizer, handling the business, settling contracts and guarding interests’, while William Lynn was ‘ten years his junior, scholarly, modest, reticent, unworldly but shielded by Lanyon and free to concentrate on designing excellence’.

6 To take a few influential examples, in Colin Rowe’s important article ‘The Blenheim of the Welfare State’, Rowe successively erases Gowan from the work. He starts out with ‘Stirling and Gowan’, which later becomes ‘Stirling and his partner’, and finally ‘Stirling’s scheme’: Colin Rowe, ‘The Blenheim of the Welfare State’ (1959), As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1996), 1, pp. 143–52. Rowe also paid Gowan scant notice in an important introductory essay: Rowe, Colin, ‘Introduction’, in James Stirling Buildings and Projects, ed. Arnell, Peter and Bickford, Ted (London, 1984), pp. 10–27 Google Scholar. In Alvin Boyarsky’s article ‘Stirling “Dimostrationi”’, although much of the article is about the Leicester University Engineering Building, Gowan’s name goes completely unmentioned: Architectural Design, 38 (1968), pp. 454–55. And, in a typical later survey, Williams Curtis completely forgets Gowan in his discussion of Leicester: Modern Architecture Since 1900 (London, 1996), p. 534. The tendency has been to look at Stirling’s later buildings and assume that, because certain formal traits appear in them, he must have been responsible for the same formal traits in buildings produced during the partnership with Gowan.

7 Architects Journal, 159, 1 May 1974, p. 930.

8 Girouard, Big Jim, pp. 186–87 and 192–95.

9 Ibid., pp. 188 and 194–95. Stirling explained this to Gowan as necessary because of the ‘lack of storage space’: James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006.

10 John McKean has made a close analysis of the development of Leicester based on these drawings: McKean, John, Leicester University Engineering Building – James Stirling and James Gowan (London, 1994), pp. 21–25 Google Scholar. The original drawings are now in the possession of the Deutsche Architektur Museum, Frankfurt (hereafter DAM).

11 Rowe, Colin, ‘Eulogy: James Stirling’, As I Was Saying, 3, p. 346 Google Scholar. This may complement Malcolm Higgs’ observation that designs seemed to arrive fully formed in the office, although his view may have been affected by his position as an architectural assistant not privy to the design process: Malcolm Higgs, interview by author, 31 October 2005.

12 I have not included Stirling and Gowan’s Preston housing scheme in this article, although a close analysis of it would support the argument made here. For a broader treatment of Preston, see my article ‘The Uses of Nostalgia: Stirling and Gowan’s Preston Housing’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 65:2 (June 2006), pp. 216–37.

13 See Stirling, James and Gowan, James, ‘Afterthoughts on the Flats at Ham Common’ (1959), republished in Stirling – Writings on Architecture, ed. Maxwell, Robert (London, 1998), pp. 76–77.Google Scholar

14 Stirling thought he could get these past the local planner and then change them: James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006.

15 Stirling, James, ‘An Architect’s Approach to Architecture’, Royal Institute of British Architects’ Journal (hereafter RIBAJ), 72 (May 1965), p. 233 Google Scholar. The local examples were the Parkleys Estate (1954–56), with 168 flats and a row of five houses of about the same date just to the north of them.

16 Planning Office, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames (hereafter LBR), microfilmed drawings dated 3 November 1955, permission refused 2 December 1955. Permission was decided by the local planner and his Town Planning Committee. In the case of the house on the Isle of Wight, discussed later, the planner was backed by an Architects’ Panel.

17 James Gowan, interviews by author, 4 January 2006 and 30 June 2006.

18 LBR, microfilmed drawings dated 3 December 1955; permission refused 15 December 1955.

19 It is possible that he was also stressed by the extra work; he had been making site visits to Ham during time he was supposed to be giving to his work at Lyons Israel and Ellis and, according to Gowan, the strain was showing: James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006.

20 LBR, permission applied for 1 January 1956, and refused 30 January 1956.

21 LBR, microfilmed drawings dated 3 January 1956; conditional permission granted 12 January 1956.

22 LBR, planning applications dated 4 April 1955, 19 May 1955, 6 June 1955, 7 June 1955 and 17 June 1955. In overall layout, Stirling’s early schemes were similar to those previously submitted by the architect Alexander Flinder on 7 June 1955.

23 LBR, microfilmed drawings dated 7 February 1956; permission given without conditions 16 February 1956.

24 LBR, microfilmed plans and elevations for two- and three-storey flats submitted 7 February 1956 and approved 16 February 1956.

25 ‘One did a bit, the other did a bit; the first developed that, the second took it on’: James Gowan quoted in McKean, Leicester, p. 18.

26 James Stirling, ‘From Garches to Jaoul’, Architectural Review, 118 (September 1955), pp. 145–51.

27 Frampton, Kenneth, Modern Architecture – A Critical History (London, 1985), p. 225.Google Scholar

28 Stirling used the word ‘programmatic’ to describe a quality that he felt had been missing in modernism since its first generation: Black Notebook, in the possession of Lady Mary Stirling.

29 Gowan had previously worked as an assistant to Brian O’Rorke (1946–50), with Powell & Moya (1950–51), and with the New Town Corporation, Stevenage (1952–53). Between 1950 and 1953 Stirling had worked for the Planning Department of the London County Council, for James Cubitt & Partners, and for Collins Melvin & Ward.

30 Lyons Israel Ellis Gray Buildings and Projects 1932–1983, ed. Forsyth, Alan and Gray, David (London, 1988), p. 107.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., pp. 11–12 and 48.

32 David Gray, interview by author, 17 October 2005.

33 James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006. Stirling spoke of planning as ‘never very marvellous during the time I was there’ and of how he ‘never saw a concept drawing’: Forsyth and Gray, Lyons, pp. 204–05.

34 ‘Le Corbusier seems to have concentrated his efforts into dealing with clients and designing; Pierre Jeanneret supplied the anchor of common sense and supervised contractors’: Curtis, William J. R., Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (London, 1986), p. 81.Google Scholar

35 James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006. Stirling may well have wanted to present the image of Gowan as the workhorse partner, the practical man in the background with Stirling as the performer and extrovert: Girouard, Big Jim, p. 89.

36 Finished designs were submitted to the local planning officer by 15 January 1956: Planning Office, Newport Council, Isle of Wight. A plan of the Isle of Wight house was used more than twenty years later in Stirling’s 1977 revisions to the Nolli plan of Rome: see Stirling, , Wilford, and Partners, , Buildings and Projects, pp. 45–47.Google Scholar

37 According to Gowan the studies ‘were undertaken to devise a working method in the then newly formed partnership’: Architectural Monographs 3 – James Gowan, ed. David Dunster (London, 1978), p. 55. ‘We agreed the free right to share drawings, to take one from the other’s boards and carry on with it. And we developed a rule as to how we’d end an argument. It would be decided by what suits the building’: Gowan in McKean, Leicester, p. 15. ‘These were a series of academic exercises undertaken when the Stirling/Gowan partnership was formed, in order to establish a working method’: Stirling, James, Buildings and Projects 1950–1974 (London, 1975), p. 42 Google Scholar. Gowan has also emphasized how their work was arranged around the teaching that both partners were doing so that at least one of them was always in the office: James Gowan, letter to author, 29 August 2006.

38 See McKean, , Leicester, p. 15 Google Scholar. Gowan has said that his later published statements on the house studies ‘were meant to emphasize joint working in the context of Stirling’s later disavowal of the partnership’: James Gowan, interview by author, 7 July 2006.

39 House and Garden, 12 (April 1957), p. 67.

40 My account of the process of designing the house studies and Expandable House is based on an interview with James Gowan, 4 January 2006.

41 Gowan, James, Style and Configuration (London, 1994), p. 62.Google Scholar

42 This device of differently shaded units, with their hard, engraved line effect, was taken up in the 1958 scheme for Steel Mills in Wales, using cladding as a means of articulating but also binding together the extremely long frontage. It can also be seen in many of the early drawings for Leicester, and it may have had some role in the diversified concrete ribbing of the prefabricated units in Stirling’s student housing for St Andrews University (1964).

43 James Gowan, interview by author, 7 July 2006.

44 Stirling, , Buildings and Projects, p. 6.Google Scholar

45 On endlessness see Davies, Richard Llewellyn and Weeks, John, ‘Endless Architecture’, Architectural Association Journal (July 1951), pp. 106–12 Google Scholar. A more literal example of ‘endlessness’ in Stirling’s later work is the Siemens AG scheme of 1969, which was conceived as having the potential to expand in linear increments. Closer to the Expandable House in its quadrant planning, establishing a structure first on which later elements could be attached, was Stirling’s 1969 project for Mass Housing in Lima, Peru.

46 Not only the School Assembly Hall, Camberwell (1958), but also the design for the Nordrhein Westfalia Museum, Dusseldorf (1975), and even the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1977–83).

47 This goes somewhat against the idea that ‘Stirling is not interested in social utopias’: Colquhoun, Alan, ‘Architecture as Continuous Text’, Architecture New York, 2 (September / October 1993), p. 18.Google Scholar

48 In the context of influential American sociology emphasizing the growth of the nuclear family, Stirling’s contribution to the Expandable House was more of the moment than Gowan’s preceding house studies: see Sadler, Simon, Archigram – Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2005), p. 37.Google Scholar

49 The built progeny of the final published Expandable House is the School Assembly Hall in Camberwell, south London, which consists of three monopitch roofs turning round a quartered plot. Here again it was Gowan who started the design, this time because in autumn 1959 Stirling was away teaching at Yale. Gowan took the quadrants idea and fed into it the banked castle motif so that the building would hug the ground on the large site. Gowan sent Stirling a copy of his initial design and Stirling responded by increasing the height of the roofs. Later, Stirling added embellishments, such as the coping trim on the walls, while Gowan detailed the windows. A further collaborator in this instance was the engineer Frank Newby, who did the structure for the roof. Finally, after the clients expressed reservations, Gowan added the windows cut into the grass banks: James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006. For the raised bank that is a strong feature of this building and the Churchill College competition design, Gowan found sources not just in medieval castles but also in Frank Lloyd Wright’s later houses: Gowan, James, ‘Notes on American Architecture’, Perspecta, 7 (1961), pp. 77–82 (p. 77)Google Scholar.

50 See Banham, Reyner, ‘Revenge of the Picturesque’, in Concerning Architecture, ed. Summerson, John (London, 1968).Google Scholar

51 See Crinson, , ‘The Uses of Nostalgia’, pp. 216–37 (pp. 218–19).Google Scholar

52 Manousso played a strong role in seeing this house through to completion and he also commissioned Stirling and Gowan to produce a site layout for a housing estate in Baddow near Maidenhead, again in 1956: James Gowan, interview by author, 30 June 2006. This importance of Manousso to the fledgling practice corrects Girouard’s assertion that Manousso only employed Stirling and Gowan for the Ham Common flats: Girouard, Big Jim, p. 90.

53 Building Control Service, Wycombe District Council (hereafter WDC), letter from planning officer to Stirling and Gowan, 3 August 1956.

54 WDC, letter from Stirling to local planning officer, 14 September 1956.

55 Gowan recounts a similar affair when Leslie Martin passed on a commission for a house in Cambridge for another disabled client. Stirling was sacked after two weeks, specifically because of his insistence on split levels and slow ramps: James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006. Gowan comments: ‘confronted with this dominating architect and the dominating Manousso, Kissa behaved as if everyone was doing him a favour’ (ibid.).

56 This second design is dated 13 September 1956: Canadian Centre for Architecture (hereafter CCA), DR2000:0042:027:002:001–005. De Stijl architecture would have been familiar to Stirling and Gowan from a number of sources including the de Stijl journal itself, as well as H. L. C. Jaffe’s de Stijl 1917–2927 (Amsterdam, 1956).

57 DAM, 246-006-003.

58 WDC, microfilmed drawings dated 13 September 1956, application made 25 September 1956, application refused 5 October 1956. Both James Gowan and the present owners of the house have said that a local architect who lived in his architect-designed house nearby and who disliked Stirling and Gowan’s proposals played a role in these successive refusals.

59 Arthur Korn, ‘The Work of Stirling and Gowan’, Architect and Building News, 214, 7 January 1959, pp. 8–23 (pp. 19–21). Interestingly, Korn’s article set the pattern for later representations of this scheme, only publishing the smaller house from the first scheme, and the second scheme. In his Black Book, Stirling simply wrote that ‘[it] was rejected by the local planning authority’: Stirling, Buildings and Projects, p. 8. In the same book Stirling also published the smaller house design from the first scheme, again with no indication of the sequence of designs or any mention of a house being built: ibid., p. 43.

60 WDC, microfilmed drawings signed 29 November 1956, application for approval dated 19 December 1956, approval granted 11 January 1957.

61 James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006.

62 See, for instance, Michael Wilford’s statement in Girouard, Big Jim, p. 247.

63 James Gowan, interview by author, 4 January 2006.

64 See Girouard, Big Jim, p. 247.

65 CCA, DR 2000:0042:023:002.

66 The purpose of the drawing was confirmed in conversation with Gowan: James Gowan, interview by author, 20 June 2006. For the Churchill College competition see Harwood, Elain, ‘The Churchill College Competition and the Smithson Generation’, in Twentieth-Century Architecture and its Histories, ed. Campbell, Louise (London, 2000), pp. 37–56.Google Scholar

67 CCA, DRCON2000:0027:720 ‘Churchill College – Report and Outline Specification’, in file marked ‘Older Projects 1950–60’.

68 James Gowan, interview by author, 20 June 2006.

69 Rowe, ‘Blenheim’, p. 146.

70 Churchill College Archives, CCAR/401/1/1, letter of 21 April 1959 from the Secretary of the Churchill College Trust Fund to the ‘finalists’.

71 Stirling, James, ‘“The functional tradition” and expression’, Perspecta, 6 (1959), pp. 88–97 (pp. 96–97).Google Scholar

72 James Gowan, interview by author, 30 June 2006.

73 McKean, , Leicester, p. 17.Google Scholar Stirling was also seeking to set up a practice in the States: Girouard, , Big Jim, p. 127.Google Scholar

74 McKean, , Leicester, p. 25.Google Scholar

75 Girouard, , Big Jim, p. 138 Google Scholar; interview with David Gray, 17 October 2005; interview with James Gowan, 4 January 2006.

76 CCA, DRCON2000:0027:720 ‘Deed of Dissolution of Partnership’. The deed also determined what would happen about copyright on drawings and access to them: ‘The copyright in all designs, drawings and buildings at any time made or designed by the Partnership shall […] from the dissolution date belong to the Partners as tenants in common in equal shares.’ All letters, documents, designs and drawings relating to the partnership were to be made available to the other partner for inspection and copying. However, these provisos on the practice’s drawings would not prevent later disputes about one partner passing off the other’s drawings as his own rather than as joint work of the partnership. When Stirling exhibited drawings at the Heinz Gallery in 1974, Gowan claimed that Stirling had omitted to mention that some were by him: Architects Journal, 15 May 1974, p. 1062; Architects Journal, 159, 29 May 1974, p. 1182. My view of this incident is that it is another demonstration of how easy it was to minimize Gowan’s contribution. It is quite possible that Stirling was not to blame for this, but rather a critic who wrote of the ‘strong but fastidious quality of Stirling’s draughtsmanship’ beside a drawing of Churchill College that had been entirely Gowan’s work: RIBAJ, 81 (April 1974), p. 11. The effect of the exchange of letters and the adjustment to the catalogue’s attributions was not so much to give greater credit to Gowan but to make him appear only to be one among many other draughtsman employed by Stirling: RIBAJ, 81 (May 1974), p. 8; RIBAJ, 81 (June 1974), p. 2.

77 Tafuri, Manfredo, ‘L’Architecture dans le Boudoir’, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990), pp. 267–71 Google Scholar, originally published in Oppositions, 3 (May 1974) pp. 37–62.

78 Eisenman, Peter, ‘Real and English: The Destruction of the Box I’, Oppositions, 4 (October 1974), p. 32 Google Scholar, n. 1. Eisenman mentions Stirling’s Sheffield University competition design (1953) as a forerunner, but he can only mean this for its treatment of the implied wall planes as its composition is still that of a single box, even if stretched either side of a central corridor.

79 Ibid., pp. 7, 9 and 20.