James Stirling

James Stirling designed sharp buildings of brick and glass in the 1960s and playful postmodern museums in the 1980s. The Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and No 1 Poultry in London show his ability to mix history and modernity.

James Frazer Stirling was born in 1926 in Glasgow and grew up in Liverpool. He served as a paratrooper in the Second World War and landed in Normandy in 1944. He studied architecture at the University of Liverpool and then moved to London. There in 1956 he set up practice with James Gowan. Their flats at Ham Common in London and the Engineering Building at the University of Leicester, with brick, glass and sharp angles, made them known.

After parting from Gowan, Stirling designed the History Faculty Library in Cambridge and the Florey Building in Oxford. From 1971 he worked with Michael Wilford. The Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, opened in 1984, has a round unroofed inner court, ramps, coloured steel railings and striped stone, and it became one of the most important works of postmodernism. He also built the Clore Gallery for the Turner paintings at the Tate in London and planned No 1 Poultry, which was completed after his death.

Stirling received the Pritzker Prize in 1981. He was knighted in June 1992 and died shortly afterwards, following an operation. He is regarded as one of the most important British architects after the Second World War. The Stirling Prize, Britain’s best-known architecture award, is named after him and has been awarded since 1996.