On Langham House Close

Eight questions to Stirling and Gowan

This is an interview conducted by Kit Evans and published in 1960 in Polygon, a small circulation and short-lived magazine produced by students at the Regents Street Polytechnic. Evans was a friend of the partners and had also assisted them on some of their schemes. Stirling was teaching part-time at the Polytechnic at this time. In his introduction to the interview Evans explained that it was originally meant to be a taped discussion 'seeded with needle – questions to provoke unprepared responses', but this couldn't be arranged and written questions and replies were adopted instead. Neither partner saw the other's replies. Evans wrote that 'one characteristic of the replies is a disingenuous tendency to avoid the point of a question here and there.

Your best-known buildings are probably still the flats at Ham Common. You will recall the 'functional criticisms of these from various quarters which alleged that they represented a retreat from fundamental principles of a modern architecture. Are you in retrospect able to agree at all with these criticisms? They are in effect an accusation of formalism; does this concern you? Could similar criticisms be made of your more recent work?

STIRLING: 'Formalism' implies arbitrariness, and I do not consider either term applicable to the Ham flats. In principle they were derived from logical considerations of planning, structure and materials; however in detail and expression certain extreme gestures have been attempted to achieve visual clarity, such as the cutting away of the brick wall to expose the minimum building support, and the excessive use of concrete (e.g. mantel-pieces, airbricks), both to limit the number of materials used, and to emphasis the basic matrix - brick and concrete. 'Formalism' also suggests a disregard for social emphasis, whereas at Ham we were most concerned to identify the extent of the dwelling in the total complex, even by the suppression of structural walls. In this country the term 'rationalism' is now associated with an over-mean concern visual interpretation of a plastic and social event. Therefore I will always try to derive from the programme a hierarchy of architectonic expression. This does not mean expressing everything, but it does mean clarifying the volumetric composition (organisational pattern), the social significance of spaces (accommodation), and perhaps to a lesser extent an explanation of the structural support.

GOWAN: Any formal solution is necessarily selective and results, at best, in the simplification of elements of lesser consequence, that is, only the important components are given visual significance. This is so in the Georgian square; the individual dwelling is understated and the servants' quarters are ignored in order to assert the architectural idea of enclosure. Modern architecture, in reacting against classicism, has been visually preoccupied with the picturesque and only in the sense that the Ham Common flats have formal aspects do they react against this situation.

The plastic interest and expressionistic intensity of your work are always apparent; but most of your buildings and projects so far seem to have evolved within a relatively restricted technological range. Is your architectural approach at all affected by the greatly extended technical potential (existing or possible in the building industry) and structural potential (vast range of new forms evolved by e.g. Fuller, Frei Otto; new techniques by e.g. Nervi, Candela)?

STIRLING: The appearance of technology is often mystically equated to modernity, but its emergence is dependent upon the nature of the programme, and it would have been Inappropriate (economically, socially and sitewise) to have attempted it on the four buildings that we have built so far (spec. flats and private houses). It is not the architect's task to invent either new materials or the fundamentals of structural method, but it is his particular responsibility to find the correct visual formation of materials and structure, and integrate these to an appropriate architectural solution. (Paxton did not invent cast-iron, nor the technique of unit repetition, but he did create a visual formation appropriate to the problem.) The application of new materials and methods is dependent upon their general availability within the industry of a country. Designing a building is a much more complex and subtle undertaking than the athletics of resolving single-span or repetitive structures.

GOWAN: Our first buildings were domestic and low-cost and this predetermined simple, traditional construction. They are meant to be realistic rather than anti-technological essays. The Banham idea of an architecture by research and mechanisation is very '1920' and disregards the basic fact that client resistance to the machine aesthetic increases as the building type becomes more personal. In other words, you will have great difficulty in persuading your client to live in a Fuller dome but he will readily accept it as a store for military equipment. The application of mechanisation is selective; it is not a panacea but rather a potential to be used when required. As the scale of building problem increases so the need for mechanisation becomes more apparent.

Are your buildings solely specific solutions to the clients' specific problems; or do you feel that they contain the germ of a more universal application? Do you imagine a situation in which your method of design and your kind of architecture, generally applied, would satisfactorily resolve the problems of today's environment?

STIRLING: The flats at Ham Common were a particular solution evolved from the clients' wishes on economics and selling, and local authority requests on density and light angles having a universal application to general problems. We might re-use our then attitude to for this specific site. As such it would be presumptuous to think of these buildings as brick (a calculable medium, not a decorative pattern), structure (not purist) and organisational pattern (location of the home in the total mass, hierarchy of wall openings).
Architects are perhaps a luxury ('I am only concerned with making beautiful the civilisation we have got' - Mies) and probably the solving of fundamental environment problems lies with others (politicians, scientists, agriculturalists etc.) but in another sense through his experience as an organiser and planner the Architect is the best trained anticipator available (Bucky Fuller).

GOWAN: The buildings are specific solutions and have no general application except as a working method which I regard as extendable to the wider issues of today’s environment, the probable result being an amalgam of heterogeneous building types.