Architectural Record loves the single-family house. For almost 50 years, since we published architect Ulrich Franzen’s own home near Rye, New York, in 1956, this magazine has promoted Record Houses as laboratories for design. No other issue of the magazine is more popular with readers than this, serving up a platterful of innovative solutions to the modestly scaled freestanding building. Demonstration projects, these houses provide case studies, incorporating social ideals, formal concerns, and stylistic or material evolution into three-dimensional time capsules.

The temptation today might be to expand the franchise, commissioning a new generation of case-study houses, widening the explorations begun by John Entenza for Arts & Architecture magazine. As Thomas Mellins observes on page 112, who wouldn’t wish to build another Eames house? Yet, as excellent as that groundbreaking program proved to be, the A&A case-study houses addressed a specific milieu: California in the years following 1945, where Modernist steel-framed structures were created for a burgeoning middle class in a paradisiacal, benign climate.