The Spender House in Essex was designed in 1968 by Richard and Su Rogers for the artist Humphrey Spender. Spender House is an intimate biographical portrait of both architecture and inhabitant, architects and commissioner.
Spender died in 2005 but his spirit is still very much present in the house and studio. The film explores the unique architectural qualities of the house and studio – regarded as proto postmodern – and provides a glimpse of its former inhabitant’s life and work as a painter, textile designer and photographer of British life in the 1930s for Mass Observation.
Spender House is a temporal exploration of place, an exploded portrait of architecture and inhabitant aided by the use of archival sound recordings of interviews made with Spender for the British Library.