The Globe and Mail

Residential Designs for the 21st Century offers one tantalizing image after another of striking, sexy and memorable houses around the world. They sit on mountain tops in South Africa, surf side in Peru, and hidden in the forests of Finland. They come formed into wedges, cubes and circles. For all of the jaw-dropping oceanfront villas — and there are plenty of those — there are also modest, resource-saving cabins. The book features, for example, a suburban house cantilevered over a train track in Japan, a prefabricated wooden starter home in Denmark, and a refurbished barn in rural Missouri. The compendium was put together by Casey C.M. Mathewson, who provides a short description of each and some of his reasons for including the project in the book. As the founder of Mathewson Architecture Berlin, he has devoted much of his career to research in design and building.