The Manifesto House: buildings that changed the future of architecture

The Manifesto House: buildings that changed the future of architecture, Owen Hopkins, Yale University Press, 2025, 240 pages, 111 colour and black-and white illustrations.

Owen Hopkins’ definition of a ‘manifesto house’ is ‘one that acts as a site for innovation, new ideas and new ways of doing things.’ To demonstrate this notion, he selects 21 examples whose architects have pushed the boundaries of domestic design, and explains how they transformed the way that architectural history can be assessed.

The selected houses fall into three categories. The first group looks back to the architectural past to create a new future, his chief exemplars being Palladio’s Villa Rotonda and Sir John Soane’s House and Museum. Also included are houses that display nostalgia – Philip Webb’s Red House, built for William Morris and the house that Robert Venturi designed for his mother in Philadelphia. The latter was at the forefront of postmodernism, which challenged the belief that the abstract formalism of ‘s’ architecture could provide a better future. The Thematic House, Charles Jencks’ own house in London, designed by himself and Terry Farrell, took this ideology further as a built manifesto of Jencks’ architectural ideas.

The second group consists of houses that connect with the natural world. Hopkins’ earliest example is Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Fallingwater, which was built over a ravine in Pennsylvania in 1938, with wide concrete balconies projecting over the stream below. The house appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1938 and instantly captured the world’s imagination. Very different in form and materials is Lina Bo Bardi’s house, Casa de Vidro, in São Paulo, Brazil, a glass block on stilts that appears to float among the trees that surround it. Not surprisingly, it suffered seriously from heat and glare in summer and cold in winter, and maintenance has been a constant battle.

In contrast, Sarah Wigglesworth’s 9/10 Stock Orchard Street, London, is built of straw bales wrapped in a transparent waterproof membrane, sandbags and gabion piers filled with salvaged rubble, though these experimental construction methods have also suffered some problems. Much less well-known is Anupama Kundoo’s Wall House in Auroville, India, a beautiful building that succeeds in mastering the climatic challenges as well as assimilation with the wider landscape.

Hopkins’ third category focuses on modernist houses built in Europe and the USA, which he describes as looking forward. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, which features on the book cover, is the epitome of modernist ideology. Built in 1931, it provided a powerful example of Le Corbusier’s Five Points of a New Architecture, one of the most famous architectural manifestos of all time. Fittingly, Eileen Gray’s house E-1027, built overlooking the Mediterranean in the south of France, also receives a chapter. This stylish modernist house was built at the same time as the Villa Savoye but, as Hopkins remarks, what makes it so compelling is ‘how it holds the mechanistic, intellectual aspects of modernism in a thrilling tension with its sensuous and humanistic possibilities.’

The houses are well described and analysed, with fine photographs, but only one – the Villa Rotonda – is accompanied by a plan, which makes it difficult to fully understand the layouts. The last manifesto house to be included is something quite different. This is the Mars House, a set of virtual images designed by artist Krista Kim and sold on the NFT crypto market for $512,000 in 2020, which exist only in the digital world. As yet, such items provide little more than a hint of how the world of augmented reality (AR) might influence the way we live in the future; but Hopkins sees them as an opportunity for architects to ensure that public values might hold greater importance than individual wealth, a theme that he pursues in the brief epilogue.

Indeed, the epilogue can be seen as a calling cry for architecture to reinvent itself, setting aside long held concepts and embracing new ideas based on combating climate change and creating a fairer world. To do this, he urges not only looking forward with the aid of emerging technology but also looking back at traditional methods of doing things before they were marginalised by the rise of modernism. The Manifesto House, he argues, provides a good starting point.

This article originally appeared as ‘New ways of doing things’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 184, published in September 2025. It was written by Peter de Figueiredo, reviews editor, Context.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation

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