Double Coding - I think this article is very interesting because Stirling makes a very nuanced point facing monumentality and modern architecture. He plees for layered architecture which is monumental ánd anti-monumental at the same time. I don't like his buildings so much but I think this aspect of his architecture is very interesting.
Summary (Stirling, 1984)
Stirling adresses the demand of a public building binary: on the one hand it needs to be monumental (because that is a tradition for public buildings) and on the other hand it needs to be informal and populist, hence the anti-monumentalism. I other words: representational and abstract. Stirling claimes that both aspects exists in his buildings.
Tom Avermaete states in the Introduction on the topic Monumentality in his book Architectural Positions that Stirling’s argument ‘recalls the concept of ‘double coding’ of Charles Jencks. This concept concerns layered buildings which appeal to both a public of connoisseurs and to amateurs. There can be introduced a double set of references. One set refers to populist- and commercial- and another to monumental architecture.
Stirlings seems to link monumentality directly with landmarks . Because he states that is it essential to have landmarks in a city and therefore a city needs monumentality. “Without monuments a city would be no place at all”. Jencks probably red texts from Marc Augé. Because a little further in his text he also addresses the term ‘non-place’. This term is used by Marc Augé to explain that a place which cannot be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity is a ‘non-place’. Stirlings uses the term in a slightly other way but also sees the need for a city to be monumental in some way.
About modern architecture introduced by Bauhaus or the International style ‘call it what you will’, Stirling addresses the notion that this was an utopian revolution which belongs to the past; it was a ‘minority occasion’. We should move forward by looking to the past (as always) and see the Modern Movement as part of the past. Stirling writes: ‘freed from the burden of utopia… we look to a more liberal future producing work perhaps richer in memory and association’.
Stirling, J. (1984). Neue Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Stuttgart: Finanzministerium Baden-Würtemberg.
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