You are in store for a visual treat. In this issue, we celebrate 50 years of Record Houses by including a collection of 10 private residences from around the world, most in stunning natural settings—flung out into the desert, perched by the water, clipped to hillsides. Saturated with naturalistic color, the images combine into a seductive experience: Suffused with chromatically enhanced light, they almost glow off the page. That is what we see, first.

As architects, we then focus on the individual houses, which, to the casual observer, might seem stylistically similar to houses first published in this magazine 50 years ago. The similarities are not intentional. Oddly, the stylistic palette may have wavered over time, but the compass needle has returned to the stark simplicities enunciated by the architects of the CIAM in 1928, Le Corbusier chief among them, who declared the value of a “machine à habiter.”