cambridge university history faculty building, 1964-1967. architect: james stirling, 1926-1992.

here is another stitched panorama, this time showing the glazed reading room.

stirling's history faculty building is a glass house but far from the sleek, miesian concept of one. as has often been noted, stirling offers a strange and very personal combination of industrial modern and victorian greenhouse. you can find something similar in the work of foster and rogers - say, the atrium of rogers' lloyds building - but perhaps too much has been made of the two meeting stirling in the U.S. while still students: there is a social consciousness in the work of rogers and a servility in foster, neither of which you'll find here.

rather, stirling's buildings are like highly formal games - and very exciting games at that. their articulated volumes are based closely on the program, less so on the site. the fact that all his early, "heroic" projects share the same materials more than suggests his disregard for the site specific. they were built to be monuments, even when just student housing as we'll see later in oxford.

this particular part of cambridge suffers from the attitude and stirling is not the sole culprit as the edges of our panoramas show: every modern building here is an island with little urban fabric to tie things together except the concrete pavement.