Flats at Ham Common

Late in 1955 Stirling was given a commission by Luke Manousso, a developer and the father of a student whom Stirling was helping with his final year work at the Architectural Association'. The commission was to design several blocks of flats on a site at Ham Common in southwest London.
Although this was Stirling's first independent work, he was unwisely cavalier about gaining the necessary planning permission. For the long, narrow site in the gardens of a large Georgian house (Langham House), he designed a total of thirty-two flats in two terrace-like blocks, the higher one with vertical windows. The flats were laid out with gardens on either side, windows looking out over the boundaries of the site to east and west, and a long paved area linking the two access roads at either end. However, the local planners rejected the scheme because not enough space was given for an access road of regulation width and the pavement was deemed inadequate for any emergency use by vehicles.

Stirling was now faced with a problem that he could not resolve. On the one hand, Manousso wanted a statutory service road running right through the site, so that the local council, rather than himself as the developer, would be responsible for services and the upkeep of public areas. On the other hand, day-lighting regulations demanded at most a sixty-degree angle from the top of the building to the edge of the site. It seemed that the two-storey blocks had to be positioned in the narrow part of the site while, somehow, satisfying both requirements.

The fit was simply too tight, and Stirling was caught in the trap of his first assumptions. Hasty but slight revisions were made, converting the paved area into a road, but again the plans were rejected.

At the architectural office of Lyons Israel Ellis Stirling had become friendly with James Gowan, who as we have seen had been an assistant there since 1954. Both had Scottish ancestry, they had shared but independent interests in vernacular housing, castles and the industrial buildings of the nineteenth century, and they were both critical of the state of contemporary modernism.

Stirling had bragged to Gowan about the Ham commission but was in some disarray at this second rejection. Gowan encouraged him to keep going, and Stirling passed him the rejected scheme to look at. Evidently, Stirling had difficulty in moving beyond slight shifts and changes of emphasis in order to face the fundamental change his scheme needed if it was to proceed.

He needed input from someone who could think very differently about how to arrange the required accommodation on the site.
After a weekend of drawing, Gowan found a solution. He removed the access road running past the lower flats and reshaped them into two T-shaped layouts, each of which really consisted of two blocks placed at right-angles to each other and joined by a deep entrance hall. These were positioned in the narrow neck of the site, leaving a large garden area between them. As a result they could be serviced from either end so as to comply with refuse and fire regulations, instead of requiring a service road running the whole length of the site; and the lower ends of the buildings were now near the edges of the site, so resolving the day-lighting problem.

This ‘Scheme A’ of January 1956 was submitted at almost the same time as another, final variation on the terraced idea, 'Scheme B’, which had one terrace of houses and one of flats. Scheme B (for which drawings do not survive) was rejected, again because the street layout and access were considered unsatisfactory. The layout made with Gowan’s help, Scheme A, satisfied both the planners' and Manousso's concerns, and was given conditional planning permission in mid-January. The accepted scheme demonstrates the immediate chemistry between each partner's formal preoccupations and how from this a solution was crystallised to accommodate both the developer's needs and the local planners' constraints.

Stirling had started with long blocks of flats and an approach that echoed the shape of the site, not dissimilar to the several previous attempts by other architects to design flats for this site. Gowan had broken and reset one of these blocks into two more energetic compositions that looked back across the depth of the site. The forms of an only slightly modernised urbanism of terraces parallel to access roads had thus been remade into housing forms that, in their modest way, suggested a more fluid relation to the space of the site. A pattern had been established here that would run through all of Stirling and Gowan's early housing schemes. And on the basis of this solution, Stirling invited Gowan to join with him in formalising a partnership.

One of the architectural examples that undoubtedly influenced their thinking, even if only negatively, was the nearby Parkleys Estate (1954–56) recently completed by Eric Lyons and Partners. Manousso, in first approaching Stirling, clearly had the Parkleys Estate in mind as representing the kind of size, construction and price that he wanted for his own project.

Lyons had achieved a popular middle-class residential form in this and other suburban housing: laid out around cul-de-sacs, generously landscaped and faced with that variety of materials often called 'people's detailing, the Parkleys Estate also drew from the better examples of 1920s continental modernist social housing.

Stirling and Gowan wanted something that was just as modern but more distinctive. Their flats set out from much the same ostensibly childless, middle-class world of privacy and individuality, looking out onto trees and gardens, but the architecture's materials and forms also attempted something a little less light-hearted and apparently complacent - to evoke the leaner, existentialist pleasures of integrity and austerity that had become shared values among the architect members of the Independent Group. Working intensely, and complementing each other, within a month the new partners elaborated the scheme, meeting the local planners' conditions and working out all the major features of the flats that were to make such an impact on the contemporary architectural scene.

Although designs passed stepwise between the partners, Stirling took more responsibility for the three-storey block, developing it into a Georgian version of Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul with inverted L-shaped windows derived perhaps from nineteenth-century warehouses, perhaps from high modernist examples. The block's syncopated elevations, which make the living spaces of the flats project towards the road while the bedrooms recede relative to the garden, establish a dynamic contrast with the flat rear side of Langham House.

Gowan designed the two lower blocks with strong contrasts between almost entirely blank brick walls beside the footpath, and setbacks of airy, entirely glazed walls exposing communal corridors and stairs. Woodwork was used as an external material equal to brick and concrete. Inside, games with light and gravity seem to be played in the suspended, concrete-walled upper corridors of the entrance halls. Although these lower blocks share the same handling of yellow brick and concrete components, they are far closer to the example of De Stijl (even the sense of contemplative domesticity in Gowan's thesis design) and quite distinct from the heavy structural dynamics and smaller scale wall articulations of the long terrace of flats.

In their living spaces the Ham flats oddly combine expansiveness of outlook and confinement of space, modernist lightness and ‘primitive’ stolidity. The tight spaces of the kitchens announce several interests: the plumbing is exposed in an 'as found' way below the sinks, while the cupboards and fittings are constructed - in a manner derived from De Stijl – of plainly separate pieces of joinery (even the vertical supports are made to appear as if they stop just short of the floor) painted gloss white or varnished to distinguish doors from support. The central core for all the flats was the double-sided chimney pier. Here the contrast of the outer walls was brought to a pitch of elemental expression in the concrete mantelpieces, shelves and corbels set into their brick surrounds, a more brutish version of what Le Corbusier had created in his Maison de Weekend (1935). As with some of the partners' other houses (the Isle of Wight house and the Dodd house, to be discussed later, for instance), these living rooms can seem over-tightly organised and the chimneys dominate the space despite their moderate size. But an interesting spatial dynamic was created: fluid yet somehow hieratic (the central hearth), alternatively flooded with light or tight and closeted.

Certainly, the architects were concerned about how residents would live with their architecture, and they recognised 'the lack of an accepted form of taste and the divergence of visual outlook between specialist and layman’. By contrast with the Parkleys Estate with its more neutral interiors and brisk fashion-forming publicity, for instance, Ham Common risked seeming too cutting edge to attract purchasers, too inflexible in the character of its interiors. But the partners did not see it like this. They described the interiors at Ham as 'a middle course, bringing the external character of the architecture into the interiors through the central core and kitchen fittings to encourage sympathetic decoration and furnishing without dominating the residents. But there was clearly a dilemma here. If the 'multi-variety of the occupiers' choices' would doubtless frustrate the desire of the architects to create a coherent design entity, should their design predict this by a bold arrangement of window members to suppress discordant tastes in curtaining?

The visual connections between Le Corbusier's Maisons Jaoul and Ham Common have been recognised ever since the flats were built. The most obvious similarities lie in the use of slender vertical and L-shaped windows, the cribbing of certain concrete details like gargoyles and projecting ventilation boxes, and the articulation of concrete components and brick infill. But this handling also acts as a kind of commentary on the Paris houses.

So, while brick and concrete are contrasted, concrete floor slabs exposed and formwork patterns retained, the more primitivising aspects of Jaouls exteriors are ignored, even inverted. Where the timber shutter-boards at Jaoul had moulded the exposed concrete as coarsely roughcast and multidirectional, even if in a 'carefully contrived pattern’, Ham's shutter-boarding seems by comparison much more neatly aligned. Jaoul's mortar appears slapped on in thick impasto and the concrete drips of the construction process have been left unscrubbed on the lower levels of brickwork, as if Le Corbusier wanted the record of making, of the labour of the construction site, to be retained in the finished house. At Ham, however, the two materials were kept carefully separate. Stirling even talked of using ‘extreme gestures ... to achieve visual clarity, such as the cutting away of the brick wall to expose the minimum building support, and the excessive use of concrete’. Furthermore, the joints between bricks have their mortar considerably recessed so that the bricks appear dryly and neatly distinct from their fixing. This effect was achieved at Stirling's express instruction, and was clearly calculated as diametrically different from Jaoul's effects. The mortar joint becomes a site of abstraction or removal, or at least a metaphor for these actions - the eradication of the signs of craft and the play of gravitational forces, leaving brick and wall as representative only of themselves. This treatment makes the wall more like a pattern, unlike the Jaoul houses where ‘the brickwork ... is considered as a surface and not as a pattern.'