The Globe and Mail

Every now and then, I come across an old architecture book that's not only entertaining to read and look at, but that also leaves me asking myself: Why can't we do that here? The most recent book of this sort to cross my path is Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, published by MIT Press. Created to accompany a show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in the winter of 1989, this collection of images and essays tells the tale of a high-minded American experiment in designing good, well-tailored modern houses at a time (like now) when residential design was all over the place, and mostly mediocre to bad.