Manifesto houses reflect new visions for how we can live. Often extreme and uncompromising, they are vehicles for innovation, new ideas and news ways of doing things.

Most houses are the product of multiple layers of norms and expectations built up over time, whether methods, materials and technologies, or social, cultural, economic and political pressures. Yet, at various moments houses have been built that break with the past and do something different – houses that stand outside of these expectations and instead are conceived to embody whole new theories or agendas. We call these ‘manifesto houses’.

For the first time, this compelling thread in the history of architecture is surveyed by Owen Hopkins. He brings together a collection of twenty-one such manifesto houses, exploring the visions for architecture conjured by Andrea Palladio, Eileen Gray, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harry Seidler, Lina Bo Bardi, Anupama Kundoo and Sou Fujimoto, among others. The Manifesto House: Buildings that Changed the Future of Architecture looks in detail at the ideas and ambitions embodied in each house, the contexts that shaped them and their subsequent impact and influence on the future of architecture.

Owen Hopkins is an architectural writer, historian and curator. He is the author of The Brutalists (Phaidon, 2023), Reading Architecture (Laurence King Publishing, 2012; 2nd edition, 2023) and The Museum (Frances Lincoln, 2021)