He also saw the functional and commercial vernacular of Liverpool as a source for a more familiar and time-tested kind of design, and he began to use local materials, like red brick, to modify the structural glass and steel of the university buildings at Cambridge and Leicester done in the late '50s and early '60s, without sacrificing the radical rethinking of program and space that modernism encouraged.
WSJ: Notes from the Archive: James Frazer Stirling, Architect and Teacher, at the Yale Center for British Art | Postmodernism's Pivotal Figure | By Ada Louise Huxtable