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Beach House

Emily Richardson

2015 00:11:29 United KingdomStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Architecture, Environment, Landscape

Description

Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism built on the UK coast of Suffolk by the architect John Penn. As well as being an architect, Penn was a painter, musician and poet. Beach House is one of nine houses Penn built across East Suffolk, each of which features designs of uncompromising symmetry, adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape. Using a limited language of materials and form, they were influenced by the time Penn spent working in California with Richard Neutra, and might be regarded as Californian modernist pavilions in the Suffolk landscape.

Beach House is John Penn’s most uncompromising design. The film combines an archive film made by Penn himself on completion of the house with experimental sound recordings made during the same period and material recently filmed in the house to explore a convergence of filmic and architectural language. Together, the material invites the viewer to piece together Beach House in its past and present forms.

Producer/Director/Camera: Emily Richardson
Sound recordings: John Penn
Thanks to the John Penn Estate, Bruce and Anne Page and Cedric Green Made with the generous support of The Arts & Humanities Research Council at the Royal College of Art, London.

Beach House is part of a trilogy of films collected in House Works: reFraming the Modern House.

About Emily Richardson

Emily Richardson is a filmmaker and researcher examining the trace of human presence on particular landscapes and environments on the cusp of change.

Richardson’s films document sites of power and corporate interest at particular moments in time uncovering layers of narrative embedded in these contested landscapes, whether East London prior to the Olympics, abandoned military architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment of Orford Ness, the oil industry on the Scottish coastline, the contentious expansion of Sizewell nuclear power station, or the exploitation of the Far North.

Richardson’s work sits within a lineage of filmmakers addressing ideas about our relationship to and impact on natural and constructed landscapes and environments through a reflexive observational approach to making work using a cross-disciplinary methodology that includes walking, photography, filmmaking, sound recording, historical and archive research, interviews, books and podcasts.

Richardson's films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally including Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, Pompidou Centre, Paris, Barbican Cinema, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals.