The Köln Museum. Imagery and imaging in the architecture of James Stirling

The 1970s museum projects of James Stirling provide the opportunity to explore a design process intended to design a building as a combination of fragments that quote historical buildings or typologies along a route. While the collection of spaces of the unbuilt museum for Cologne indirectly reveals Stirling’s own architectural imagery almost in a chronological sense, the drawings produced to present the competition entry in 1974 are anything but explicit and ask the reader to collaborate to decipher the architectural contents. This apparent contradiction is here analyzed and discussed in the key provided by Stirling’s peculiar interest in drawing, his office organization, and the agency Leon Krier had in it while preparing the drawings for the first monograph on the Scottish architect.