T.S. Eliot may have thought April was the cruelest month, but here at Architectural Record, we look on the bright side because it's time for our annual RECORD Houses awards. Now in its sixth decade, the Houses issue is always full of surprises, with our selection of the best new projects by architects who experiment with form and materials on a domestic scale, often in spectacular settings.

Renzo Piano never designs houses (not counting the Diogene, a tiny—8 foot by 10 foot—prototype of a sustainable cabin he produced for Vitra last year). But now he has built a retreat in Colorado's Rocky Mountains for a private client. Despite the project's grand size, the architect liked the essential intimacy of creating spaces for human habitation, and he broke down the scale of the house into a village-like cluster to enable it to nestle into its mountain site.