Reds Under the Bed

Encompassing two trajectories (the historical and the off-the-wall), three countries (UK, Germany and Spain), nine projects and 14 different creative acts, Inter 9 will continue to eek every last ounce of invention out of architecture's twentieth-century canon. For 2011/12 we're abandoning a bearded cleric in Barcelona for a schnitzel-eating Englishman in Melsungen. Acting like a hungry pack of architectural surrealists, we'll deface and remake 'Big' Jim Stirling's inimitable worm's eyes, bird's eyes, isos and axos while we blur, distort, disassemble and reconfigure the boundaries between models and drawings by almost magically expanding laser-cut drawings from 2D to 3D. These artful yet rational constructions will be located either in and around Stirling's incomplete Braun factory complex, or within one of his famous trilogy of red brick buildings in Leicester, Oxford and Cambridge or even within the imaginary space of one of his complete/ incomplete drawings.

We'll bed down with Stirling right from the start. One group will head up the M1 to Leicester, another down the A3 to Haslemere and a few via the M4 to Oxford. In the first three weeks we'll translate these buildings into information aesthetics – inventing ways of recording the glazing, materials, facades, leaks, cracks and alterations – and using the buildings as 'living found drawings' to produce a 3D Stirling archive. We'll then set-off to the heartland of Germany's fairytale heimat, starting with the Stirling exhibition at his Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and then heading north to Melsungen. Later we'll travel with our constructions to the rough concrete and masonry building in Granollers, Spain to work again with Toni Cumella, who'll help turn ideas into artefacts.

In between, Léon Krier, Anthony Vidler, Michael Wilford and other luminaries will explode various Stirling myths and recreate a few others in Inter 9's debut 'seminar sessions'. These will address not only the practice and drawing processes of this wildly idiosyncratic architect, but his extraordinary encyclopaedic historicism. By the end of it all, our brains will be as big as our stomachs, and you'll not only be fluent in Stirling, but multi-lingual, too, in the associative languages of Choisy, Miralles and Ungers.

Unit Staff

Christopher Pierce studied at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and gained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Among his recent publications are essays on Jordi Bonet Armengol, 'Gaudi's Gatekeeper' (2011) and Cero 9, 'Bump and Grind' (2011). He formed Mis- Architecture (mis-architecture.co.uk) with Christopher Matthews in 2000.

Christopher Matthews, principal of Pastina Matthews Architects (PMA), was educated at the Bartlett School of Architecture. For nearly a decade he worked with James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates on projects including the Singapore Arts Centre, Lowry Centre and No 1 Poultry before setting up PMA in 2000.