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Stirling Wilford and Associates, 1980-2000

June – August, 2023
First Floor Rooms

Past exhibition

This exhibition provides an opportunity to explore the unexpected everyday life in an architectural office, Stirling Wilford and Associates, through selected documentation from the archives of the firm.

Before Dublin, this exhibition was shown in Liverpool (Victoria Gallery and Museum), Rome (Pantheon) and Milan (Architects’ Board). It will run in the first floor rooms of the Irish Architectural Archive from 1 June to 25 August, 2023, and is presented in collaboration with Drawing Matter, the 20th Century Society, the British School at Rome and Sheppard Robson.

While acknowledging his close links to certain educational and working companions, James Stirling’s architectural trajectory has always been considered that of the individual genius. Without diminishing Stirling’s importance and inspirational role, this exhibition shows the practice to have been more varied and collaborative than might have been imagined.

Stuttgart Music School and Theatre Academy. Photographed by Richard Bryant (1996)
Temasek Polytechnic, Singapore: partial axonometric drawing of the complex (early 1990s)

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.

Previous Exhibitions

2025

A Form of Justice: the Four Courts Marshalsea, Dublin

The Architect as Artist: Paintings by Brendan Millar

Ireland House Tokyo

Karl Burke

to be filled

2024

Best Laid Plans: an exhibition by visual artist Mandy O’Neill

The Charm of K-Art

Neighbours in Space and Time: Grafton Architects at Sir John Soane’s Museum

The FNCI at 100

Chemins de migration

2023

The Coiffured

Little Republics

Remaking the Crust of the Earth

The Architecture of al-Andalus: Photographs by Michael Barry

Stirling Wilford and Associates, 1980-2000

Buildings End: An Ultimology Drafting Room

Architectural Presidents

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