Robert Venturi’s iconic 1964 house for his mother in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, a departure from the “less is more” ideal of his architectural peers at the time, offered a strong but subtle statement. In his own words, its gabled form created “an almost symbolic image of a house.”

These days, you can forget subtlety. A string of recent projects takes an in-your-face approach to revive the gable once again. In Tokyo, Sou Fujimoto stacks prototypical house shapes three stories high in a wood structure. In Zaandam, the Netherlands, Delft-based WAM Architecten goes further, or higher, with its 12-story, blocklike composition of traditional cottages from Holland’s northern Zaan region. Herzog & de Meuron plays a game of Jenga with extruded versions of the same shape for VitraHaus in Vitra’s architectural park in Weil am Rhein, Germany.