Luis Fernández-Galiano   The house puts us to the test. If the domestic project is about life, any house makes us choose between effort and routine. In his prologue to Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, Ortega y Gasset described the existential ambiguity of the Germanic and Ar

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas   France   A couple with three children living in the center of Bordeaux planned to build a new house outside the city, but took years to decide on an architect. When a serious road accident left the father disabled on a wheelchair, the family resumed its inter

MVRDV   Holanda   Located on a square near a 19th-century park, this house is a compromise between the conflicting lifestyles and needs of its two resident couples. The couple that first purchased the lot found itself short of funds to shoulder the costs of building a

Kazuyo Sejima & Associates, Ryue Nishizawa   Japan   The S-House addresses the problem of building a home for six – a couple, two children and their grandparents – without resorting to family stereotypes that can no longer play a decisive role in the shaping of the domestic sphere, given the increasing

Shigeru Ban   Japan   Shigeru Ban’s investigations on non-conventional structural materials and elements such as PTS cardboard tubes and his commitment to non-governmental organizations in the giving of aid to communities of refugees affected by disasters have been widely

Harry Gugger   Switzerland   European collective housing since the interwar period has been characterized by lines of serial repetition, either horizontal or vertical. When joining two separate houses with the same plan, which have shared communal installations and spaces, these

Werner Bäuerle   Germany   The position and shape of the adjoining houses is mainly determined by the strict regulations governing the many beech trees which cover the plot. The fluidity of the relation between the interiors and the gardens infuses the dwellings with the feeli

Walter Unterrainer   Austria   In the town of Bregenz, where the Austrian region of Vorarlberg reaches Lake Constance, the two houses form part of a green, residential neighborhood. The climate of this area is characterized by low temperatures from the beginning of autumn until th

schmidt/hammer/lassen/ architects   Germany   Situated in a residential neighborhood of private properties, where bylaws determine that buildings are detached, these two houses form a project with a tension between differences and similarities. Built for two brothers, each dwelling responds to a

Dirk Jan Postel   Netherlands   The house presents a case study of the current situation in architecture and of the changes which are occurring in the work of an architect. The project is based on the repetition of a modular unit, the size of a single bedroom, that determines the s

Andrade Morettin Arquitetos   Brazil   With such a clarity of composition and theradicality and precision of the use of material and techniques this Brazilian house makes another type of statement. The two volumes have the Kahnian hallmark of contrasting materials between the served space

Lacaton & Vassal   France   This house is transparent in two ways: because it creates a direct relationship between inside and out and because it illustrates very clearly its aims. A long shed, on one level, with a pitched roof, it is placed quietly in the landscape without dra

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   In contrast to many other projects, after several months of building, we still did not know how to finish off the house from the outside, what facade to give it. We developed the whole unit from within, from a patio around which we laid out the diffe

Baumschlager Eberle Architekten   Austria   The architects were commissioned to build a house for an unmarried mother in a scenic green zone outside the Austrian town of Lochau, on grounds belonging to the client’s parents. The project was subject to a single condition: that the new building b

Morger & Degelo   Switzerland   The keen interest in wooden constructions that characterizes current Swiss architecture ties up with an old tradition, though on very different grounds. Vulgar folklore has given way to experiments in the standardized use of semi-finished timber piec

Peter Märkli   Switzerland   It was in the seventies that buildings of exposed concrete began to replace the white boxes of the classical avant-garde in signature house projects. The later works of Le Corbusier might have had something to do with it. Here Peter Märkli continues

Pauhof Architekten   Austria   The project consists of two boxes. One, light and polished, without visible means of support, is dressed with aluminum sheets and levitates above the larger part which is rough and heavily clad with exposed concrete. A conventional residential plan i

Beat Consoni   Switzerland   Working over and reconstructing something that already exists is an increasingly important architectural practice, especially in dense urbanized Europe. With buildings becoming obsolete right and left and open natural spaces getting scarcer and scarc

Fink+Jocher   Germany   A house is a house is a house, one is tempted to say – emulating Duchamp – when faced with the sophisticated innocence of this work of Dietrich Fink and Thomas Jocher. Both teach at the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning of the Polytechnic Univ

Antonio Citterio, Terry Dwan   Italy   As the house is painstakingly implanted on the southern slope of a hill through a terrace system of platforms and low walls, and presents a tower embraced by a lower L-shaped volume, a domestic program would be the last thing the observer would expec

Heikkinen-Komonen Architects   Guinea-Conakry   Depending on how one looks at it, the suggestion that this African house by the Finnish partners Heikkinen and Komonen could have been built with any other palette of materials – corrugated metal and glass, for instance, like Glen Murcutt’s projects

Eduardo Souto de Moura   Portugal   Very close to the Miño River estuary, on the other side of the frontier with Spain, is a small Portuguese town called Moledo do Minho: a coastal location that is perfect for a family house, raised here upon an what used to a farmland, on a plot with

João Álvaro Rocha   Portugal   By dint of capitalizing on the view of the sea, as the project brief prepared by the architect insistently reminds us, the house is a window. This is surely its greatest merit, but also the source of some of its defects. Built on a low plinth, the co

Wendell Burnette Architects   United States   In the United States, the single-family house is one of the few ways by which a young architect, or any architect not belonging to the ‘star system’, can carry out a project on his or her own account. Just as independent cinema opens up paths of crea

Williams + Tsien Architects   United States   The project for this house results from an intense and at times contradictory debate with the place it is situated in. Built, like the Burnette house, in Phoenix, Arizona, it has the benefit of a desert-like landscape, completely horizontal except fo