James Stirling was one of the most influential architects of the late twentieth century. He established his world-wide reputation in the 1960s while still in partnership with James Gowen, and his strong personal style is first seen to emerge in the extraordinary Leicester University Engineering Building (Leicester, 1959-63), the last project to be completed by the partnership.
Its slender, almost transparent, tower rises above the projecting forms of its wedge-shaped auditoria. This constructivist inspired ensemble is juxtaposed with the industrial toughness of the engineering workshops whose saw-tooth factory glazing cuts across its roof at an acute angel, setting up a powerful and contradictory geometry.
'Architecture In Detail' is a superbly photographed and technically informative series of monographs which embraces a broad spectrum of internationally renowned buildings, drawn predominantly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each sixty-page volume contains a lucid text by a respected author; a sequence of large-format, high-quality colour and black and white photographs; a comprehensive set of technical drawings and working details; and a complete bibliography and chronology, thus making these books the definitive work on the subject. They are essential purchases for enthusiasts, practitioners and students alike.
