To see built form is to see colour. Alternatively, architecture cannot be colourless. Even glass-clad buildings reflect their surroundings while all-white structures are revealed through various shadows and shades. To what degree, then, should colour be considered an architectural element?James Stirling and Architectural Colour, a PhD thesis by Michael William Farr submitted to the University of Manchester in 2013, explores how, exactly, architect James Stirling (1924-92) used colour and what it might say about the evolution of his design ethos. Going beyond what has been written so far this investigation explores the significance of colour in the eclectic array of strikingly individual buildings Stirling designed throughout his career. But while these structures are presented as often visually arresting and idiosyncratic, their varied colour schemes also reveal significant thematic consistencies across his oeuvre. Initially discussion centres on Stirling’s rather contrary use of relatively muted colours. By simply countering expectations or clashing with established contextual characteristics, Stirling ensured his buildings visually attracted attention, courting comment and controversy. In addition it is proposed that he used colour as a means of enticing and inviting those who saw/used his buildings to explore and investigate the very fabric of his structures. As his palette became bolder, so too did his contextual references. Acquainted with the attention-grabbing benefits of incongruous colours, Stirling also recognized the increasing importance of context. By combining sympathetic forms with ever-brighter colour schemes he paradoxically designed buildings that simultaneously fitted in while standing out. It is also argued that these much brighter colours represent a regard for those using his buildings dating back to his and James Gowan’s Preston Housing Project (1957-61). His exploration of structural candour in some projects left them less than hospitable, but the overt anthropocentricity of his later designs is not presented as entirely new. If his colour schemes, in later years, changed considerably, his motivations did not. Focusing on specific design issues - contrariness, structural explication, contextualism and anthropocentricity – this thesis does not attempt classification. Set against Modernism’s demise and Post-Modernism’s ascendancy, Stirling’s relationship to both is explored; his propensity to draw upon any style he felt appropriate revealing the futility of labelling his work as either one or the other. If his earliest designs contain the eclecticism and metaphoric content normally associated with Post-Modern architecture, his later buildings employed a typically Modernist candour regarding materials and techniques. Throughout his career Stirling consistently sought to design buildings that were visually striking, contextually inspired and inviting to explore. His reliance upon both a multiplicity of styles and the considered use of colour was fundamental to these aims.

In this thesis the author presents a history of non-convergent series which, in the past, played an important role in mathematics. Euler's formula, Stirling's series and Poincare's theory are examined to show the development of asymptotic series, a subdivision of divergent series.

This dissertation is a study of a remarkable change that came about in the kind of drawings that architects used to present their work between the decades of 1960 and 1990. Drawings in this period, visually rich and compositionally complex, seemed to mark an entirely new sensibility towards their function; their goal seemed to be not so much to clearly depict the forms of a proposed building, but to instead focus on its conceptual aspects. In fact, in several cases, drawings seemed to be treated as graphic projects in their own right, over and above the work they presented. This trend was accompanied by two other developments. Around the same time, there was a sudden increase in theoretical interest in drawings within the architectural community leading to a flurry of published articles, essays and books on the topic. And all this happened to coincide with the time that the Postmodern movement came to dominate architecture. The study aims to understand the relationship between these trends, and to develop a better understanding of the reasons for these changes to have occurred. It does so by, first, developing a theoretical framework to help understand the nature and impact of the changes in drawings. Next, it presents a detailed historical account of these changes. This is followed by an in-depth study of a single architect, James Stirling, to show how the new types of drawings were not simply a means to present ideas, but played a formative role in design as well. Apart from developing a contextualized historical account of an important development in contemporary architectural history, the study also finds that the change in the drawing practice and the theoretical interests were not simply an outcome of Postmodern cultural theory of the period, but were instigated by concerns that arose from within architecture itself. It thus offers a useful case-study on how changes in disciplinary practice are brought about.