Ideas of Disorder is a detailed portrait of 3 Church Walk, the home of British modernist architects H.T. and E.R. Cadbury-Brown, which they jointly designed and built in 1962. Published to coincide with the artist Emily Richardson’s film about the house, the book expands on the film’s script by Jonathan P. Watts by bringing together a rich array of archival material — much of it previously unpublished — including snapshots, sketches, floor plans, as well as Richardson’s photographs of the house in its recent semi-abandoned state. The book is a long-overdue invitation to anyone interested in architectural history to consider the legacy of H.T. Cadbury-Brown and Partners, one of Britain’s few homegrown modernist architecture firms whose structures — from early work on the 1951 Festival of Britain to the iconic brutalist building for the Royal College of Art in London — await, and deserve, rediscovery.
‘Right up until the current day the basic understanding of modernist architecture is, “that of an industrial muteness a mechanistic reduction that is abstract sometimes to the point of inhumanity. This rich study of 3 Church Walk carefully unravels some of the more romantic threads that ran through postwar architecture capturing subtle attitudes to nature the arts materiality and the memory traces of lives that were laid down in this small private house in Aldeburgh epicentre of a certain pastoral English aesthetic modernity.’”
— Douglas Murphy author of Last Futures: Nature Technology and the End of Architecture