Do all architects live in glass houses of their own design? Some whose homes are on display in this coffee table book did built themselves the expected steel and glass cages in post-International Style. Others are more imaginative, making use of local materials and settings rather than imposing an ideology of design on the places where they live. Among the most interesting is Jennifer Beningfield’s home in rural South Africa, a string of differently shaped boxes covered in rough-textured lime-washed plaster mimicking the hard, semi-desert surfaces outside. Kerry Hill responded to a lusher environment by constructing a compound of minimal lines out of a former rubber plantation in Sri Lanka. The chapter called “Drawing on the Past” looks at architects’ homes from earlier times, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin.
