With its conversational tone, the exchange captured in the book manages to complement the images and drawings more successfully than is usual in a conventional monograph. The dialogue goes beyond a comparison of the houses and leads to discussions of the typology of the house itself. By doing so, it transcends the conceit of dueling dwellings, opening up a larger discourse on the practice of architecture. But it’s a fun read—both light and serious.

Included in the book is an essay by Robert Levit, associate dean of architecture at the University of Toronto. He writes specifically about Tehrani’s practice, both past and present, and “what [Tehrani] has described as the relationship between figuration and configuration.” Levit explains this as the difference between building parts (the material components that make up the structure) and the overall shape of the building. In the case of the Villa Varoise, the distinction has been blurred due to the nature of cast-in-place board-formed concrete, creating a house more reductive, singular, and pure. This, as Levit and Cohen both note, is a slight deviation from Tehrani’s other work, in which the modularity and manipulation of the building material is expressed in the plastic form-making of the building itself.

The art of this book is that it can be enjoyed on several levels. It is a deep dive into the design process and the meticulous execution of one single house, and its surrounding landscape, taken from initial concept and site strategies through drawings, diagrams, models, and construction details. (Photos of the built structure, completed last year, occupy the book’s right-hand pages, opposite the text.) But the book is also a manifesto—a reminder to all of us that as architects it is “our responsibility to change the status quo . . . to motivate the discipline, and produce not novelty, but innovation.” If you manage that, then the results of the design process just may be “better.”