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

our first stop was cambridge. we came for the monuments but fell for the town.

for sheer compositional exuberance, the history faculty building was a great sight. it is surprisingly small - all those clever moves in so little space - but that only adds to the intensity and charm of it.

I have seen this sold as new brutalism as well as early high tech but the fact is that stirling's three red masterpieces don't fit categories comfortably.

a sense that the history faculty is composed mainly from the outside, and a certain lack of tactile qualities - the hard red tile and pink concrete are not all that generous - relate the building more closely to stirling's final, postmodern works than I had expected. few buildings from the sixties appear so self-aware and so aware of what came before and how the modernist heritage could be rearranged. proto-pomo, maybe. maybe not.

pathetic moment of the trip was being thrown out of the building by a historian who could barely lift her own two arms. I think we left out of pity, puzzled by both historians and their architect.

(panoramic stitch of several photos)

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