James Stirling was raised in Liverpool, studied there, and spent his career refusing to settle into a manner. His partnership with James Gowan produced the flats at Ham Common and then the Engineering Building at Leicester, the first of what critics later called the Red Trilogy — three university buildings in red brick and red tile, each assembled out of frankly industrial parts, each more wilful than the last. The sequence runs from the tail of Brutalism into something else entirely, and by the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, opened in 1984, Stirling was quoting cornices and drums with a straight face, which made him the most argued-over architect of his generation. He won the Pritzker Prize in 1981 and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1980; the British prize for architecture now carries his name.
