Engineering Building at Leicester University, designed by James Gowan and James Stirling, felt like a new beginning, the emergence of an English vernacular form of modernism.
Stirling and Gowan’s designs for Leicester University’s Department of Engineering felt like an explosion of new language. The department had a legible ‘engineered’ structure – you could read what the elements did in supporting the building – but also had a sculptural, almost constructivist aspect to its plant and façade. It was expressive and eclectic, but also clearly modern. Sadly, after he split with Gowan, Jim’s buildings lost their lightness of touch and their humour, but he was a huge influence on all of us at the time, as well as a hugely exciting, big presence when I was at Yale. Jim attached himself to our little gang of British students; Norman, Eldred Evans (who was the most talented of us all) and I visited New York with him, enjoying architecture and cocktails at the Four Seasons. (Jim thought he had escaped notice while slipping their elegant ashtrays into his pocket, only to discover them appearing on his bill when we left.) We shared an apartment for a period, hosting the most riotous parties, with plates thrown out of the window to save on washing up, and regular visits by the police.
Gowan (left) and Stirling in front of the building in 1963.
For my second semester at Yale, Serge Chermayeff, who was a professor at Harvard, took over from Paul Rudolph. Chermayeff had escaped from Russia to England in the 1920s, where he worked with Erich Mendelsohn on projects such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and the Hamlyn House in Chelsea, but moved to the United States in 1940. He took a more intellectual and European view of architecture than Rudolph in books like Community and Privacy, looking at the balance between the public and private realms, and at how distinctions and transitions between them could be preserved in a modern world that seemed intent on blurring them. Chermayeff was a great teacher and an intellectual force and he dominated us completely. I remember thinking that if he had opened a window and told us we could fly, we would have leapt out.
But of all these teachers, Vincent Scully made the deepest impression. His lectures drew students and architects from miles around, and regularly received standing ovations. He would hurl himself round the stage when he was lecturing, once becoming so animated that he fell off and broke his arm. His breadth of knowledge and understanding of the history of art and architecture, particularly of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, was complemented by a deep civic sense of the relationship between buildings, people and places (he recommended we read Paul Ritter’s Planning for Man and Motor, one of the first books to consider seriously the impact of cars on cities).
Norman Foster’s and my student project design for Yale Science Buildings. Heavily influenced by Louis Kahn, our scheme included a central spine of car parking, service towers and lecture theatres along the ridge of the hilly site with laboratories spilling downhill either side.
Vince’s lectures opened up new ways of seeing and experiencing buildings, and in particular helped me to understand Frank Lloyd Wright and his ordering of internal and external space. Wright had a profound influence on me. Norman, Eldred, our brilliant fellow student Carl Abbott and I visited every Wright building we could.
Norman Foster, me and Carl Abbott, at Yale in 1962.
Su and I went to stay with the sculptor Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam, thanks to the connections of her father Marcus. They lived about an hour from Yale, in Middlebury, and their house felt like the heart of an intellectual colony: the artist Alexander Calder and the philosopher Lewis Mumford lived nearby. We spent six months there, with the Gabos and their daughter Nina, in this incredible artistic and intellectual milieu, intoxicated by evenings speculating about the future and its possibilities.
Back at Yale, Norman Foster and I began working together closely. Like me, Norman had a scholarship, but his background was as different to mine as could be imagined. He had gone to grammar school before taking a job at Manchester City Council and completing his national service in the Royal Air Force. He managed to persuade Manchester University to take him on as an architecture student, largely on the basis of a portfolio of excellent drawings, and was a star student there.
We instantly struck up a friendship. Norman has a brilliant mind, and an incredibly clear way of explaining and arguing. At Yale, his drawings were already exceptional, while I still struggled, but we connected on a far more instinctive level. For five or six years, we would talk for hours every day, often late into the night, about cities, about architecture, about our practice. It was an intense, verbal love affair, and I don’t think I’d ever had such wonderful intellectual discussions with anyone else. We travelled in Carl Abbott’s VW to New York, and to Chicago, which we thought of as the Florence of the States, where we visited buildings by Wright and Mies, Louis Sullivan and the early modern pioneers.
Our final-year project (see opposite) was a scheme for science laboratories at Yale. Our design clustered round a central spine, with laboratories down the sides of the hillside site. It had service towers and an expressive structure and its spine followed the line of the slope. At the crit – the formal review of student projects that forms a central part of architectural education to this day – Philip Johnson, the don of American modernism, then teetering on the edge of his descent into post-modernism, snapped off one of the service towers, muttering as if to himself, ‘These will have to go.’ Looking back, I can see so many of the roots of our later work in that project – the separation of ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces, the central movement axis, the articulated and expressive towers, the use of prefabrication.
The muscular industrial architecture that inspired us on our road trips across the USA.
Smoke stacks and case studies
After graduating, Su and I decided to head out west. We had read Kerouac’s On The Road, and wanted to feel the expansiveness, the sense of space and possibility that America could offer. We relished the way that architects like Neutra, Meier, Schindler and Ellwood had found the freedom to build houses from scratch, and were swept off our feet by the results. Like many young people, we wanted to find our own spirit, our own language, our own technologies to solve the problems of the day.
In particular, we continued to see as many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings as possible. Some architecture, like Le Corbusier’s, can be readily understood through looking at façade, plan and section, but Wright is different. His buildings express place and movement. You have to move through them to understand how they work, how they respond to landscape and light, how the relationship between inside and outside is expressed and resolved, how the play of light and shadow changes, brought to life by the sweeping lines of the buildings. We wanted to develop a language that could respond to Wright’s ideas – about light, landscape and movement – without simply mimicking his particular style or his forms. We preferred his earlier, more contextual work, though his more sculptural later buildings (like the New York Guggenheim Museum) have proved an equally powerful inspiration for architects like Frank Gehry, Amanda Levete, Jan Kaplický and Zaha Hadid.
The other influence from those early road trips was the industrial architecture around Long Island and New Jersey – the pipes, tanks, girders, gantries and towers of the refineries, factories and processing plants that spilled out around the city, the water towers and grain silos that rose from the flat countryside
