Langham House Close and Maisons Jaoul

The visual connections between Jaoul and the flats that Stirling designed with James Gowan in Ham Common (1955–58) have been recognised ever since the flats were built. The most obvious similarities lie in the articulation of concrete components and brick in-fill, the use of slender vertical and L-shaped windows, and the cribbing of certain concrete details like gargoyles and projecting boxes.

There is also, broadly, a shared attitude towards site layout. Both schemes are interventions in streets of older buildings, though one was a single-sided street leading off a village green and the other a plot in a rather grand and dense inner suburb.

The handling of materials at Ham is recognisably related to Jaoul as a signpost to a source. But this handling also acts as a kind of commentary on the Paris houses - in Bloom's terms it is a creative misreading or swerve. So, while brick and concrete contrast, concrete floor slabs are exposed and formwork patterns retained, the more primitive aspects of Jaoul are ignored, even inverted. Where the timber shutter-boards at Jaoul had moulded the exposed concrete as coarsely roughcast and multi-directional, even if in a 'carefully contrived pattern, Ham's shutter-boarding seems by comparison much more neatly aligned. Jaoul's mortar appears as if it is slapped on in thick wodges 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 are kept carefully separate. Stirling even talked of using 'extreme gestures ... like the excessive use of concrete ... [to] achieve visual clarity' rather than gross materiality.

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 actually achieved in the building process and at Stirling's express instruction, and was clearly calculated as diametrically different from Jaoul's effects.

The mortar joint becomes a place of abstraction or removal, or at least a metaphor for these actions – the final eradication of the hand and of the evident play of gravitational forces, leaving brick and wall as representative only of themselves. The move symptomatises Stirling's anxiety over Le Corbusier's influence. It is not a case of some inevitable absorption of Le Corbusier's changing architecture by 'the co-optive effect of the rationalised production process of contemporary architecture', the rendering innocuous of such qualities by 'well-behaved pupils', the correction of Jaoul's errors, or some other formulation that simplifies Stirling's ambivalence about Jaoul.

The Ham flats indicate the generative nature of Stirling's ambivalence about Le Corbusier. The swerving away from the otherwise overpowering influence of the precursor is about the significance of deviation as a process, as opposed to iconic resemblance as static acknowledgement (perhaps better found in Post-Modernism).