The first built application of a scissor section was,
allegedly, by husband-and-wife architects Colin Jones and
Jennifer Tudor-Hart. They designed Westside, a private
development in London's Muswell Hill. It was completed in 1962.
Jones worked at the LCC's Architects' Department, and the
scissor section was also tried out in several council housing
schemes across the capital in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Examples are the Tidey Street scheme in Poplar and some blocks
on the Pepys Estate in Deptford (redeveloped in 2005). The
concept was first published in The Architects' Journal in 1962,
after Corringham had already been designed, but it was not
widely adopted.
Frampton may have heard about the scissor section via
Douglas Stephen's wife, Margaret Dent, who had worked at the
LCC's Architects' Department in the 1950s. He was also
intrigued by a constructivist project made for the Russian
Organisation of Contemporary Architects in 1927. The design,
by architects Ivanov and Lavinsky, featured a central "street"
with interlocking apartments. Frampton saw it as a "metaphor
of the woven-togetherness of a communal dwelling". The Russian
plan was never built, but Frampton considered Le Corbusier's
Unité d'Habitation its belated realisation. At Corringham,
he combined this idea for a "communal dwelling" with the LCC's
new scissor section.
