House Works: reFraming the Modern House

The politics of the interior of the house – as both psychological and physical space – is lacking in historical accounts of modern architecture.

House Works is a trilogy of films that I made over a period of four years between 2014 and 2018 about three modernist homes in East Anglia – two of which were lived in by their architects. I have tried to counter the overwhelming narrative of the heroic aesthetic icon by attending to the quietly radical ways these buildings were inhabited. In my films of H.T. ‘Jim’ and Betty Cadbury-Brown’s 3 Church Walk in Aldeburgh, Suffolk (1962), John Penn’s Beach House in Shingle Street, Suffolk (1969) and Richard and Su Rogers’ Spender House and Studio, near Maldon, Essex (1968) I have constructed alternative readings of space and ways of life that were culturally connected, creative and unconventional. In each of the films a house is reconstructed as a film, reactivating the architectural space as filmic space. We don't often think about it but the narrative of the house is akin to a filmic narrative, the house a collection of objects, memories and images, an archive and in some instances a private museum. It’s these narratives that emerge in this trilogy of films. The stories of each house are embedded in the surfaces, objects and materials found within the domestic interior: reactivating these spaces lost to architectural history, the films express aspects of the potential stories held there.

House Works is a compilation of three works. Each film is also available individually: 3 Church Walk, Beach House, and Spender House.