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Wall Street Journal

‘The Manifesto House' Review: Living the Architect's Dream

The critic Paul Goldberger, voicing a sentiment many know intuitively to be true but have perhaps never articulated, described architecture as 'the only art that we have no choice but to engage with.' You can avoid museums, concert halls and screens big and little, but buildings, like the poor, will always be with us. And so it follows that to understand buildings, it can be useful to understand the thought processes behind them. In 'The Manifesto House,' the writer and curator Owen Hopkins is eager to get into the minds of architects whose residential buildings, in the words of his subtitle, 'changed the future of architecture.' In 21 chapters divided into three somewhat overlapping subcategories—'Looking Back,' 'Looking Out' and 'Looking Forward'—Mr. Hopkins seeks to explore houses that do not 'reflect received or prevailing ideas that have become internalised among architects, builders and clients/users, and are held and enacted almost unconsciously.' The houses featured here sprang from the minds of disparate figures across time, from the Georgian neoclassicist John Soane to the postmodernist Robert Venturi, and the book includes widely known figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright and those who will likely be unfamiliar even to adepts, such as the contemporary Senegalese firm Worofila. Any architect can imagine a daring design, and many have. Yet, as the author notes, few 'manifesto houses' exist, for the simple reason that 'it is so rare for architects to get the opportunity to put what are ultimately polemics into practice.' Clients, those pesky people who actually have to live in most houses, won't allow it. That is why 'manifesto houses,' in Mr. Hopkins's definition, tend to be built by architects for themselves to occupy, or otherwise for genuflecting admirers with 'deep interests in architecture and what it can do.' Mr. Hopkins's definition has two aspects, which presents potential hazards: For inclusion, he states, houses should contain a polemical element and also have changed the course of architectural history. It's not clear, though, that all his chosen examples adhere to these criteria. Who can doubt that Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotonda (1566–ca. 1590), the home outside of Venice that is the subject of the book's first chapter, changed the future of architecture? Its strident symmetry and extended loggias continue to echo in buildings today, not least in the neoclassical public architecture constructed in the nascent American republic.