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The book by Owen Hopkins is chic and tactile and seems to have been designed for the low tables. It could be another object For lovers of property to display, rather than anything that is supposed to be read. But The manifest house is something else entirely. Despite the luxurious quality paper, extravagant photography and the cover image of Le Villa Savoye de Le Corbusier in Poissy, as elegant and crunchy as an ocean lining, Owens wrote a radical book, a reflection making authority on the private house as a catalyst for progress and a meditation on the future of architecture. He wonders if the profession has a future.
The book is a repertoire of 21 canonical houses, which Hopkins has chosen because they “are not simply a reflection of the ideas, methods or ideologies in force, but act as innovation sites, for new ideas and new ways of doing”. Everyone embodies a way of organizing domestic life whose time had not yet come. Often, they were built by architects for themselves, their families or for private customers ready to submit to uncompromising programs.
The houses are organized in three categories. The first romance group the past as much as the future. Philip Webb's red house (1860), built in Kent for William MorrisAnd Maison Vanna Venturi de Robert Venturi in Philadelphia (1964), built for Venturi's mother, were a century apart. But the two mix the retro-nostalgic design with what was once progressive ideas.
The second group of Hopkins faces the world outside: Fullwater by Frank Lloyd Wright in Pennsylvania (1938), with its concrete balconies hanging on rocks and waterfalls, is an obvious example. But the house of Sou Fujimoto Na in Tokyo (2012) is less known outside Asia. With almost no walls, this radically transparent house is so dematerialized that it is hardly there.
The third group faces the technological future. Presenting this category, Hopkins describes the unrealized “zip-up house” of Richard and Su Rogers (1967-69) as a “oversized device” than a house. (The 58-year-old architects of an electric car with a load cable connected to its walls is a nice retro-futuristic detail.) The artist Krista Kim's House (2020), a Nft Which sold for the cryptographic equivalent of more than $ 500,000, does not exist in any physical sense. For Hopkins, it represents the fracturing of conventional architecture and the possibility of something new.
Many houses that Hopkins selected were built in the United States in the 20th century: the “fervent belief in modernism” has lent manifests. But there are also recent examples of Africa and Asia. The Senegalese Practical Keru Mbuubenne from Worofila, a house completed in 2021, employing small -scale construction techniques in the boom of the construction of the 21st century of Senegal, is one of the most elegant examples.
Readers interested in casualness will appreciate the book. Manifesto houses are generally expensive and elitist, but this provides tension to Hopkins' thesis. There is a progressive voice in contemporary architecture as director of the Farrell Center for Architecture at Newcastle University, which has hosted some of the best exhibitions on cities and the environment built in recent years. He is also part of the conservation team representing the United Kingdom and Kenya during this year Architecture biennial in Venice With an installation that faces uncomfortable themes, including the relation of the United Kingdom with its former colony.
In the epilogue of the book, Hopkins resolves this tension between elitism and progress by calling for a new “post-architectural” age, driven by climate change and a push for a fairer world, which partly involves reusing existing buildings rather than constantly building new. In any case, he maintains that “most construction projects take place today without the involvement of an architect” and that the agency and the influence of architects have never been inferior.
In doing so, he suggests that manifesto houses, with their constant research of novelty and the elevation of the architect to the visionary, belong to the past. He may have written the first revolutionary book of coffee – an explosive disguised manifesto.
The manifest house: buildings that have changed the future of architecture by Owen Hopkins, Yale £ 30/40 $, 240 pages
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