"We have no intention of changing men's habits, but we have hopes of proving to them how fragile their thoughts are, and on what cellars they have erected their unsteady houses."


Surrealist Declaration of 27 January, 1925




For the surrealists a house was not a concrete structure, it was a metaphor to get at the marvellous, the startlingly strange. Despite being trumpeted as the first exhibition to "explore the relevance of surrealism for architecture", what this new The Surreal House exhibition at the Barbican does best is explore the richness of the house as a symbol - of the body, of imprisonment, of fragility, of the womb.