After the so-called ‘red trilogy’ (the University of Leicester Engineering Building with James Gowan, the History Faculty and Library at Cambridge, and the Florey Building at Queen’s College, Oxford), the high-tech experiments, and the German museums, the projects featured here are a clear expression of a ‘monumentally informal’ process of production, to use Stirling’s own words. Fluctuating between doodles and technical drawings, the documentation reveals the collaborative nature of architecture and the relentless progress from idea to completion.

These drawings were created against the backdrop of the advent of the computer as an architectural tool, a development which changed forever a particular way of producing architecture.

In addition to material from the Stirling Wilford and Associates archives, the exhibition includes items from the personal archives of Mark Girouard, author of a 1998 biography of Stirling, and of Richard Bryant, who photographed most of the work of the firm from the completion of the New State Gallery in Stuttgart (1984), one of the masterpieces of the office. Excerpts from Michael Blackwood’s Stirling (1986) and a documentary by Annalisa Sonzogni (Doodles, 2021) complete the exhibition.