Driving to Big Sur on coast-hugging Highway 1 — say, south from San Francisco — you have to be cautious.

It is no surprise to learn that, before turning his hand to architecture, Marcio Kogan directed films.

Architecture need not always be serious. And nowhere is lightheartedness more fitting than in a vacation house.

Cade Hayes admits he was nervous when he started work on the Tucson Mountain Retreat, a 3,650-square-foot house on the edge of Saguaro National Park.

With his design for the Atrium House, 36-year-old architect Fran Silvestre takes a fresh look at 20th-century Modernist formulas, from the courtyard houses of Mies van der Rohe of the 1920s and '30s to the Case Study Houses in Los Angeles of the 1950s and '60s.

No hotel tower or gritty boardwalk impedes the dramatic sunset over the wide, windswept beach of Mar Azul, a remote and laid-back vacation town a few hours from Buenos Aires on Argentina's South Atlantic coast. 'Blue Sea' may be something of a misnomer, as the water is brown and turbid, but the rugged landscape is no less lovely for it.

Conceptually, the quirky house on an L-shaped lot in the affluent outskirts of Osaka has a lot in common with a traditional Japanese dwelling.

Visitors to the hilltop neighborhood of Travessa do Patroc'nio in Lisbon come screeching to a halt (even if on foot) when they first glimpse a three-story house whose walls pulsate with lush vegetation.

While most of its eurozone neighbors were whacked by financial crises, Switzerland managed to avoid a recession, and its economy grew by 1 percent in 2012.