Welcome to Corringham

Exterior

Corringham is a purpose-built apartment block, built privately in 1962-64 in an elegant minimalist style. The Grade II listed building has eight floors with six apartments each, an underground parking garage for residents, and a beautiful private communal garden. Eighteen of the apartments – all on the lower three floors – have one bedroom each; the remaining thirty flats have two bedrooms. The extra space needed to accommodate these extra bedrooms is realised by an "overhang" at the rear of the building. Each apartment has an east-facing balcony overlooking the garden and London's West End.

The exterior of the block is elegant and simple, of a modernist style with references to the architectural style of the "Neue Sachlichkeit" and to Le Corbusier's designs. As an application of Mies van der Rohe's idea that "less is more", pure geometrical forms and lines are emphasised, and the three main building materials are easily identified as concrete, metal, and glass. The use of strong metal window frames allows for a slender frame design and large windows, which increases the visual transparency of the block. The mirror-backed glass panels under the windows deliberately reflect the sky and surrounding buildings, making the block look relatively small and light. This was meant to achieve a modest architecture and to respect as much as possible the character and scale of the traditional London town terrace opposite. Kenneth Frampton says that the mass of the building owes to the ideas of Atelier 5 in Switzerland, contemporaries whose work was well respected for its logical proportions and humane planning.

The rear of the building is equally minimalist, but it is enlivened and opened up by the subtle rhythm of inset balconies and by the contrasting black railings.

Minimalist exterior

The carefully detailed service column at the northern side of Corringham was given a very different architectural treatment. The powerful vertical emphasis of the lift shaft, stairwell, and boiler flue gave Corringham a reputation as one of the first major buildings in the sculptural "Brutalist" style in Central London. Its design refers to the architecture of James Stirling and to the practice of Lyons, Israel, and Ellis, the "birthplace of true Brutalism in Britain". The deliberately visible incorporation of the rubbish chute and extractor fans is an application of Le Corbusier's idea that a house is a "machine for living in". Clearly "form follows function" here – as professed by the American architect Louis Sullivan, sometimes called the father of modernism. The design of a separate service column is used in a more extreme form in Ernö Goldfinger's Balfron Tower nearby.

The service column reveals some of the internal complexity of the building through its floor-to-ceiling windows: there is only one landing for every two floors. Corringham is one of the few buildings in the world constructed with the elegant split-level "scissor section".

Colours

Corringham's colour scheme has always been as minimalist as its structure. In 1964, all of the concrete was left unpainted, as were the ventilation shafts and the entrance canopy. All metal and wooden window frames were black. Texture was added by rendering most of the north and south elevations. The rolled-cast plate-glass panels below the living room and bedroom windows (on the east and west facades) were backed with silver-coloured lead foil to make the building reflect its surroundings with a slight dark-blue hue. Only the light blue rubbish chute stood out.

Inside the building, the walls were white, including the oblong tiles in the foyer. The tiled floors and stairs in the communal areas were chocolate brown. The welded steel tube stairwell handrail was painted silver to match the ventilation shafts and entrance canopy outside.

Some time before Corringham was Grade II listed, all but the rendered surfaces were painted white - presumably because the bare concrete had started to look weather-worn. The concrete floor slabs and walls, the window frames, and the rubbish chute were painted white. Black gloss was applied to the railings and vents. This new colour scheme respected the minimalist design of the building, although the white window frames arguably make the front elevation look a little busier.

Corringham's colours in 1964

 

Corringham, London W2 3EH