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The Manifesto House by Owen Hopkins<\/p>\n
Almost all houses, says the architectural historian Owen Hopkins, reflect \u201creceived ideas\u201d ingrained in architects, planning bodies, regulations and clients \u201cabout how houses are designed and built in particular places at particular moments in time\u201d. Manifesto houses, on the other hand, embody new theories, utilise innovative techniques and materials, and represent self-contained visions for how we could live. In his handsome, illustrated survey, Hopkins presents 21 houses that have shifted the nature of what architecture can be.<\/p>\n
Nearly all are 20th-century buildings, although Hopkins starts with Palladio\u2019s 16th-century Villa Rotonda before ticking off the familiar likes of Le Corbusier (Villa Savoye), Frank Lloyd Wright (Fallingwater) and Mies van der Rohe (Farnsworth House). More interesting, because less familiar, are buildings such as Sou Fujimoto\u2019s House NA in Tokyo (2012), a series of irregularly stacked glass boxes that blur the boundary between nature and architecture, and Anupama Kundoo\u2019s Wall House (2000), which transposes the artisanal ethos of Arts and Crafts houses to rural India. Hopkins\u2019s hope is that the ideas embedded in some of these structures will have a beneficial effect not just on architecture but on wider society. Her First American by Lore Segal<\/p>\n The New York Times has described Lore Segal as \u201ccoming closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel\u201d with Her First American \u2013 now published in a UK edition for the first time, 40 years after it appeared in the US. Its story follows an Austrian Jewish refugee, Ilka Weissnix, who arrives in New York City in the early 1950s only to come across fellow immigrants. Her search for a \u201creal American\u201d takes her on a train journey south, where she meets one \u2013 Carter Bayoux, a black intellectual \u2013 with whom she begins an affair. But this isn\u2019t a simple love story \u2013 it\u2019s a nuanced narrative of the immigrants who shaped New York and how the US has shaped them.<\/p>\n Ilka details her personal experiences of alienation, anti-Semitism awhile observing the deep wounds of racism in America. Thanks to Carter\u2019s connections, she attends Jewish weddings, satirical African-American shows and holidays with her lover\u2019s friends, both black and Jewish, in moments of solidarity between the two cultures. Both groups move forward constantly looking over their shoulders \u2013 it is these people that are the \u201creal Americans\u201d moulding the country into its current form. Picky by Jimi Famurewa<\/p>\n In Picky, Jimi Famurewa revisits the culinary terrain of his youth to map the contours of identity, memory and belonging. The Evening Standard\u200a\u2019s chief restaurant critic threads his evolution from a boy who pocketed mashed potato to a literal arbiter of taste, unpacking the politics of it all along the way. School lunches become metaphor for institutional imposition; a bowl of jollof rice defiant reclamation.<\/p>\n As a British-Nigerian man, the author\u2019s \u201cscrambled identity\u201d becomes both the text and subtext of a life navigated between cultural poles. Famurewa is sharpest when teasing out how personal pickiness can belie greater truths about identity, like when a fellow student at school steals lunch not because they are a bully, but rather their mother has neither the time nor money to pack them one. Food is a code \u2013 social, familial, psychological \u2013 and his questions about what it means to belong are asked not in abstractions, but in mouthfuls. Picky is thoughtful, bubbly and honest, and Famurewa does well to exhume painful memories with a light touch. His prose drips like beef fat on chips: it\u2019s rich, if not at times a little indulgent. But his book reminds us that caring about what we eat is not about self-gratification but self-formation. Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick<\/p>\n Genre-wise, large tracts of the Irish writer Gethan Dick\u2019s debut novel, Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night, could be described as gentle apocalypse. Or softcore Armageddon, perhaps. Society has collapsed after plague and war, but while wolves do howl and marauders do maraude, such menaces feel distinctly remote. Consequently, the book opens to strange and tender emotions. A band of neighbours team up and resolve to cycle from their shattered south London street to southern France. But they don\u2019t flee in panic. They leave only once they\u2019ve lain on their home beds long enough to feel ready to abandon them forever.<\/p>\n Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only \u00a38.99 per month<\/p>\n One character cannot reconcile himself to the new world, insisting that one day \u201cthe clock would run backwards and it would once again be the time of beer in taps and burgers in freezers and bread in packets and milk in cartons\u201d. So held \u201cby the solidity of how things had been\u201d, he cannot understand they will never be that way again. These quiet melancholies of a slow calamity give the reader pause \u2013 especially as Dick nudges us to ask if we\u2019re in one already.
Yale University Press, 240pp, \u00a330. Buy the book<\/a>
By Michael Prodger<\/p>\n
Sort of Books, 304pp, \u00a310.99. Buy the book<\/a>
By Zuzanna Lachendro<\/p>\n
Hodder & Stoughton, 384pp, \u00a320. Buy the book<\/a>
By Zo\u00eb Huxford<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net\/2021\/09\/TNS_master_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
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Tramp Press, 220pp, \u00a313.99. Buy the book<\/a>
By George Monaghan<\/p>\n