User:Hammite/Flats at Ham Common

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Langham House Close Langham House Close is a private development of thirty flats, standing in gardens around a cul-de-sac of the same name beside Ham Common, near Richmond, London. The buildings have been Listed Grade II* by English Heritage.

Completed in 1958, the development was the first built project of the (subsequently world-famous) architects James Stirling and James Gowan, who drew wide critical acclaim for their ‘Flats at Ham Common’(1).

James Stirling began the project design alone, but invited James Gowan into partnership to help him with the development in 1956. It has been claimed that Stirling sought Gowan’s help primarily to overcome difficulties in gaining planning permission for the development. Gowan allegedly resolved this problem by splitting the flats into three blocks: a three-storey block of 18 flats around three hallways, straight along the cul-de-sac, and two two-storey blocks of 6 flats radiating from central halls, the blocks mirroring one-another within the gardens.

The Development’s use of exposed shuttered concrete, alongside coarse brickwork with recessed mortar, exemplified the bold re-interpretation of earlier modernism which characterised Stirling’s work. This uncompromising architectural grammar extended to the use of bare concrete elements such as the suspended staircases and walkways in the communal hallways and projecting gutters from balconies and roofs.

The brickwork at Langham House Close appears to have been heavily influenced by that employed by Le Courbusier at the recently constructed Maison Jaoul in Paris (1952-3)(1c). Inspired by this structure, Stirling was prompted to create a modern architecture in brick – more suited to the British climate than the large concrete or painted expanses which exemplified pre-war modernist architecture on the European Continent (1). Stirling and Gowan’s use of very precise, clean, brickwork at Langham House Close gave the architects an opportunity to develop the “immaterial and abstract qualities of a weightless architecture”(1b). This skill was vital to their joint, and Stirling’s solo, great projects of the 1950s and 1960s – The Engineering Faculty at Leicester University (1959-63), The History Faculty at Cambridge University (1963-1968) and The Foley Building at The Queen’s College, Oxford University (1966-1971)(1c).

The Flats at Ham Common were later cited as an early example of the “New Brutalism” style of modern architecture which became widespread in 1950s’ and -60s’ Britain(1), although both Stirling and Gowan rejected this interpretation. While stating that Langham House Close was a landmark in 1950s’ architecture, whose worth was likely to endure, Nikolaus Pevsner characterised the Flats as “an ideological theorem imposed on the inhabitants”(2). More recently, the flats have been viewed as a “masterpiece” of mid-twentieth century architecture by the Twentieth Century Society, which lobbied to upgrade the structures’ listing from II to II* in 2005(3).

1 Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford, James Stirling, buildings and projects (1984), p51 1b Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford, James Stirling, buildings and projects (1984), p52 1c Alan Berman (ed.), Jim Stirling and the Red Trilogy: Three Radical Buildings (2010), p19 1 Rayner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (1966) 2 Nikolaus Pevsner, Surrey (1971), p93 3 http://www.c20society.org.uk/casework/reports/2005/post-war-par-excellence.html

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