Sydney talk—Owen Hopkins, The Manifesto House

Join author Owen Hopkins and respondent Kate Goodwin in Sydney for a discussion in his recent book, The Manifesto House – Buildings that changed the future of architecture.

The Manifesto House reflects new visions for how we can live. Often extreme and uncompromising, they are vehicles for innovation, new ideas, and new 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.”

NOTE: Tickets strictly limited—ticket price redeemable as a discount from book purchases.

About the speakers

Owen Hopkins is a curator and writer. He is Director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University in the UK – a public centre for architecture and cities which he has led through its opening in April 2023. Currently, he is also part of the curatorial team for the British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Prior to joining the Farrell Centre, he was Senior Curator at Sir John Soane’s Museum and before that Architecture Programme Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. Across these roles he has curated numerous acclaimed exhibitions and has written or edited over twenty books, journals and other publications. A frequent commentator on architecture in the press, on radio and TV, he writes regularly for a range of media. He lectures internationally and is a guest critic at architecture schools, as well as a judge for a number of architecture awards.

Kate Goodwin is a curator, writer and educator working at the intersection of art, architecture and city making. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Sydney, member of the Tin Sheds Gallery advisory board and former Head of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.