The dwelling is the most fundamental building type, nowhere more so than in the open landscape. This book can be read in a number of ways. It is first a book about houses and particularly the theme ‘dwelling in the land’. It examines the poetic and prosaic issues inherent in claiming a piece of the landscape to live on.
It can also be seen as a compendium of individual design approaches, illustrating a wide range of significant responses to the problems of site-specific architecture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Cases in clude the work of studioKAP, Peter Zumthor, Le Corbusier and others. It could also be seen as a kind of road map, full of both warnings and encouragements for all those involved with, or just interested in, the making of houses. That the domestic realm and the landscape can be vehicles for significant architectural insights is hardly an original observation. However, this book seeks to bring these two topics together in a unique way. In exploring a building type that lies at the cusp of what is commonly understood as ‘building’ and ‘architecture’, it asks fundamental questions about what the very nature of architecture is. Who indeed is the architect and what is their role in the process of creating meaningful buidlings?