www.quondam.com/65/6485.htm

Quondam
From: Stirling's Inheritance To: Stirling's Legacy Re: Stirling's Muses

1.8

Rowe's quotation confirms he was well aware of the screen of trees at the Staatsgalerie, yet he does not give any significance to the presence of the trees within Stirling's overall design intention. Proof of the trees' significance, however, may be gleamed from their being included within one of Stirling's early conceptual sketches.

[I]n spite of its admirable merits (and they are extraordinary), Stuttgart is a building with no face. And it is not a question that no face could be seen because of a screen of trees. Instead, it is just the issue that, when considering intercourse with a building, its face--however veiled--must always be a desirable and a provocative item.

Colin Rowe, "James Stirling: A Highly Personal and Very Disjointed Memoir" in James Stirling - Buildings and Projects, (New York: Rizzoli, 1984).

Although Vidler does not make direct reference to the trees at Stuttgart, he makes a mistake in seeing the "original stoa" of the Altes Museum "marked by a terrace" at the Staatsgalerie instead of seeing the stoa marked by the gallery's "screen" of trees.

Thus Stirling takes away not only the facade of the Altes Museum but also its front sequence of rooms turning the original palace plan into a U-shaped block reminiscent of the old gallery to one side. The site of the original stoa is marked by a terrace, reached by a ramp from street level. Then the stair, once set behind the stoa, is turned into a second ramp that rises from this terrace to the entrance and gives access to the courtyard in the rotunda

Anthony Vidler, "Losing Face" in The Architectural Uncanny - Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 92.

Stirling's Muses Part I