Brilliant Or Cursed By Apollo?

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Harvard University buildings are designed by some of the most renowned and idiosyncratic individuals of our time. That is their trouble. An assembly of soloists has produced what British Architect James Stirling calls "an architectural zoo." Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts bullies its neighbors with masses of streaked concrete. The nearby Gund Hall by Australian John Andrews is a glass ziggurat housing the Graduate School of Design. It, in turn, clashes with Memorial Hall, a colorful Victorian Gothic fantasy across the street.

Now Stirling is adding what a Cambridge, Mass., guidebook calls "another strange beast" to this menagerie. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, to open in October, combines the bold orange and gray stripes of Memorial Hall with the proportions of Andrews' design school. But the Sackler's most startling feature is its aggressive mixture of historic motifs with raw industrialism. The slant-sided, flat-roofed entrance jutting into the street vaguely resembles the Lion Gate at Mycenae, but it is built of glass and metal and ! guarded by exhaust pipes with garishly painted air vents. Comments Harvard Graduate Student Michael Cornfield: "The entrance looks like Superman's Fortress of Solitude." Inside, a steep, monumental staircase features antique friezes on one wall, while the opposite side is adorned with massive tubular brass railings.

These surrealist collages have become Stirling's signature, and the Sackler, which will house part of the collection of Harvard's venerable Fogg Art Museum, is the first American showcase for his impudent style. Critics generally praised the architect's drawings when they were first shown four years ago. Ada Louise Huxtable remarked, "The building is remarkable for the creative virtuosity with which its functions are accommodated while suggesting a monumentality that belies actual dimensions." She added, "This is not easy architecture. And it is not innocent architecture. It is knowledgeable, worldly, elitist and difficult . . . You've got to be as good as Stirling to pull it off." At Harvard, reaction to the new building is ranging from approval to outrage. John Coolidge, professor of architectural history, calls the building "brilliant," at once "striking, convenient and, above all, a sympathetic setting for works of art." Counters Law Professor Charles M. Haar: "The Sackler is even uglier than the Burr Lecture Hall that was there before. The site must be cursed by Apollo." The Sackler's alternately amusing and infuriating clash of details may blind critics to its innovations. The theatrical staircase, for example, clearly separates three stories of public exhibitions at one side of the building from five stories of educational, research and administrative activities on the other. In the galleries, the doorways and changing proportions of the rooms subtly draw visitors along.

Stirling's growing reputation belies the controversy surrounding his work. A 59-year-old Scotch architect of imposing girth but unpretentious manner, he was little known in the U.S. when Harvard selected him in 1979 from among some 70 competitors for the Sackler job. Since then, he has won the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the international $100,000 Pritzker Prize and some of England's and West Germany's choicest commissions, including an addition to the Tate Gallery in London and a science center in the monumental heart of West Berlin. He is the subject of a lavish catalog with commentary, to be published next month, titled James Stirling: Buildings and Projects (Rizzoli; $45). Philip Johnson, the doyen of his profession, has endorsed Stirling as a longtime wunderkind who is now "a mature leader of world architecture."

The son of a marine engineer, he grew up in the port city of Liverpool. This may account for the many portholes, railings, air funnels and other nautical paraphernalia on his buildings. A passion for high technology dominated his first well-known works: the Leicester University Engineering Building in 1959 and the Cambridge University History Faculty Building in 1964. Both ignited controversy. Both look like acrobatic feats of steel and glass that resemble constructivist factories, highlighting mechanical gadgets like window- cleaning gantries.

But Stirling's modernism was muted in the 1970s, when British avant-garde architects adopted the American and Italian nostalgia for architectural "references" and ornamentation. In a few buildings designed with Partner Michael Wilford, Stirling made halfhearted concessions to historicism. His first completed U.S. commission, Rice University's 1981 School of Architecture in Houston, for example, is a staid, humbly conventional structure -- with an asymmetrically placed porthole punched in an end wall, almost as a defiant postmodernist afterthought.

He finally abandoned all attempts at stylistic harmony in his design for the New State Gallery in Stuttgart, which opened last year. The exquisitely proportioned classic entrance hall is assaulted by a bilious green Pirelli rubber floor covering and the gaudily painted steel frame of the elevator shaft. The circular interior courtyard, with sensuous marble nymphs basking in the glow of golden travertine and sandstone walls, is assaulted by vulgar pink and blue pipes that serve as handrails for a spiraling ramp.

Like the cacophonic "Beaubourg" cultural center in Paris, Stuttgart's razzle-dazzle mix of strawberries and onions attracts huge crowds. But unlike the Beaubourg, which disappoints as museum and library, the New State Gallery provides ingenious solutions to some tough predicaments. Stuttgart required a walkway through the museum, lest a residential neighborhood be cut off from the central business district. Stirling built a ramp on top of the spiraling wall of the inner court as a pedestrian connector. His New State Gallery, furthermore, gets along surprisingly well with the old, an adjacent neo- classic stucco palace built in 1843, because the new building neither clashes with nor detracts from the old. Together the elegant old palace and Stirling's busy, undulating facade, with its slanted and curved glass wall, reassert the city's unity and cultural presence along an unfortunate freeway. Both at Harvard and Stuttgart, Stirling and his clients are firm believers in the traditional sequence of well-defined gallery rooms rather than rambling "flexible" spaces. In both museums his art tends to dominate the art it is supposed to display.

The link between Stuttgart's old and new museums is an inconspicuous bridge. Inside, the bridge is a gallery through which visitors cross, unaware that they have passed from one building to another. Stirling has proposed a similar connector between the new Sackler and the old Fogg museums at Harvard. It would be a boon to visitors of both buildings and would bring some unity to the architectural medley around the Harvard campus.

Throughout his career, Stirling has been applauded for stirring things up. One wonders if the applause will last. His current style caricatures society's inner conflict between nostalgia and faith in technology. But architecture is not the proper medium for social comment. It remains to be seen whether Stirling can leave the rostrum and answer the basic aims of comfort, stability and delight -- the great goals of his profession -- without satire or theatrics.