James Stirling´s School Assembly Hall at Brunswick Park as synthesis of the search for a language

Abstract

In a context marked by the beginning of post-modernism, Manfredo Tafuri wrote in 1974 the article “L'Architecture dans le Boudoir: T he Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language”. Faced with the exhaustion of the linguistic repertoire of Modern Architecture, he identifies the work of James Stirling as an exemplary exercise for the recovery of architectural language. In this article we hypothesize that the work Assembly and dining hall for Brunswick Park Primary School, London 1958-1961 by James Stirling and James Gowan, it is a kind of Proto architecture that synthesizes the previous work of Stirling and fixes all the elements that he will repeat in their well known buildings of the 60s. Consulting his early writings and Stirling's “Black notebook”, we propose to base ourselves on the theory of The Four Elements of Architecture by Gottfried Semper to defend that the new grammatical structure proposed by Stirling begining from a review of these elements, “signs empty of content” in the words of Tafuri, to reconstruct from them the linguistic structures of the language of modernity.