Only when history is decarbonised and decolonised will we understand how architecture should advance. For the time being, the art and science of building design are additionally hobbled by ‘systemic’ gender bias and ‘western-centric’ chauvinism.
If the dreary fugue of DEI rhetoric and the baffling clichés of archispeak make you want to scream, this book may not be for you. But get beyond the annoying tone – which combines dire waffle with apocalyptic prophecy – and Owen Hopkins has an important subject. The ‘Manifesto House’, he tells us, is evidence of a ‘deep and all-encompassing vision’ enjoyed by its designers. And these visions project themselves into the future, the place we are all going to live.
In three sections he painstakingly describes 21 remarkable houses, some familiar, others less so. There is Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and the concrete’n’glass construction that a young Richard Rogers designed for his parents in Wimbledon. There is the inclusion of the newly fashionable mid-century Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro in Sao Paolo, plus a house in Senegal to refresh the woke agenda.
There is no Edwin Lutyens. And if someone had asked me to write this book, I might have included the extraordinary house in Vienna which Wittgenstein made for his sister – a manifesto if ever there was one. In conclusion, Hopkins treats us to an account of Krista Kim’s ludicrous Non Fungible Token project which recently sold for $512,000.
‘Manifesto’ crept into English from Italian and originally denoted the protestations of religious sects. Since Karl Marx’s announcement of communism in 1848, the word has suggested confrontation, not engagement. Is there any other profession where elite practitioners are so at odds with their public? In medicine, for example, there’s a shared understanding that a doctor’s task is to make you better. Architects tend to believe the customer is always wrong. As Wright nearly said: ‘If the roof doesn’t leak, you are not trying hard enough.’
It’s well understood that designing a dwelling that is both functional and beautiful is at the outer limits of human capability; the number of decisions needed in the process would cause even powerful AI to stall. Yet, as Camus said of defining beauty, it’s not so much a matter of knowing the answer as always asking the question. Approvingly, Hopkins quotes William Morris, whose own Red House in Bexleyheath is included here: ‘If I were asked to say what is… the most important thing… the most to be longed for, I should answer: a beautiful house.’
I suspect Hopkins sees himself as the new Charles Jencks, the tireless late promoter of the mess that was post-modernism, a term he did not invent but exploited very thoroughly. Jencks’s own ‘cosmic’ house in Notting Hill is featured here, a rich man’s indulgence which Hopkins thinks a ‘mesmerising exemplar’ of collective meanings. I have seen it many times and regard it as a farrago of symbolic mumbo-jumbo, expressed now in embarrassingly fatigued MDF and delaminating composites. Visiting it is like reading a very old press release.
Hopkins’s polemic involves searching for a ‘truly transformative architecture’ that will only emerge when everyone embraces pluralism of style, gender and geography. Modernism is dismissed as ‘a whole value system that has, quite rightly, been done away with’. Really? Modernism was not a style but an attitude. And that attitude was wanting to make the most of contemporary possibilities for the largest number of people.
This is a curious moment for architecture. The retro fantasy of Poundbury coexists with the dizzy towers of the City, but the Shard & co are fantasies too, if of a different sort. The way out of this muddle, according to Hopkins, is to conceptualise what he calls ‘post-architecture’, which, if I follow him correctly, needs to be ‘tied to the earth’ and purged of vanity. This will be achieved by a close study of the houses included here.
The problem with The Manifesto House is this: to be a reference book it would need more original research and better pictures; to be the compelling argument Hopkins wants, it would need a finer style and firmer grip on the art of precis. In short, it’s not a very good manifesto.
The beautiful and useful house – indeed, beautiful and useful housing – should be a consecration of all we believe in. And it will more likely be made from solid blocks than intangible blockchains.
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