The mushroom top was initially explored as a way to bring daylight into the center of the thrice-repeated structure’s nine-square grid, and that is a key pursuit of two other Record Houses. In Vancouver, Lantern House, by 2022 Design Vanguard Leckie Studio, includes a dramatic 9-foot-square, full-story-high light well above the living room. Less bold but more methodical, Williamson Williamson captures light in smaller pockets in Toronto’s House of Monitors. Elsewhere, a respect for the setting drove design decisions. Both Morningside Residence in Miami, by Brillhart Architecture, and Casa Primaveras outside Guadalajara, Mexico, by Estudio Macías Peredo, are carefully laid out and constructed around existing trees on their arboreal sites, making views to those trees a significant part of the interior experience. And, in Culver City, California, a love of all things Japanese, especially the country’s vanishing artisanal techniques, informs a house by Jacobschang Architecture.

In another section of the magazine, we examine not the newly built but the newly renovated, with three historic urban townhouses that have received updates. And, again, bringing light into those often darker dwellings was a fundamental strategy. But our survey of shelters kicks off with three contemporary takes on the shingled cottage—by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects in New Brunswick, Waechter Architecture in Oregon, and Bates Masi + Architects on Block Island—a small, very traditional typology made infinitely appealing to modern tastes.

RECORD’s annual appraisal of houses is an opportunity to look ahead—to novel ways of living, reconsidered priorities, and new technology that affect residential architecture—but also to look back. Do any of the projects in these pages represent a future iconic house like, say, Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House, the subject of one of several books on houses we round up in this issue? And what’s become of some of those canonical houses from the past? We talk to architect Andrew Ferentinos, who is restoring two houses by Peter Eisenman, a theorist who has never been afraid to take risks in practice. Perhaps therein lies the point. GO BIG—keep on investigating, keep on experimenting—especially on a small scale. And to do that, there’s no place like home.