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• RESIDENTIAL DESIGNS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
• EDITED BY CASEY C.M. MATHEWSON
• FIREFLY BOOKS
• 575 PAGES
• $69.95

Residential Designs for the 21st Century offers one tantalizing image after another of striking, sexy and memorable houses around the world. They sit on mountain tops in South Africa, surf side in Peru, and hidden in the forests of Finland. They come formed into wedges, cubes and circles.

For all of the jaw-dropping oceanfront villas — and there are plenty of those — there are also modest, resource-saving cabins. The book features, for example, a suburban house cantilevered over a train track in Japan, a prefabricated wooden starter home in Denmark, and a refurbished barn in rural Missouri.

The compendium was put together by Casey C.M. Mathewson, who provides a short description of each and some of his reasons for including the project in the book. As the founder of Mathewson Architecture Berlin, he has devoted much of his career to research in design and building.

The book is organized geographically, with a total of 200 houses in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, North America and South America.

Mr. Mathewson favours architects who present fresh designs and overcome challenging sites.

He chose single-family residences as the focus of the book, he says, because they offer architects and their clients the most creative platform for experimenting with individual spatial compositions and new building materials.

Many of the featured houses served as the proving grounds for young architectural firms, he adds, and, as a result, they are an especially revealing window on the future and upcoming architectural trends.

Typically, each project is depicted by three or four photos, a plan and a straightforward description.

Mr. Mathewson seems to be aiming at readers who have a fairly sophisticated knowledge of design and architecture — or at the very least, know their plenums from their plinths.

But the presentation may be too vague for people who are not accustomed to reading postage stamp-sized plans or figuring out from only a couple of images what is going on inside a building.

Readers who have their interest piqued by a captivating photo may be frustrated that they can't see more of the house. At the same time, the renderings may not be detailed enough to be of much interest to architects.

So, while Mr. Mathewson has assembled a catalogue of high-fashion architecture, he hasn't made it easily accessible.

Still, as he points out, ideas do flow across the oceans and through the world's schools of architecture, and people who are interested in that exchange will find lots to ponder here.

The architects profiled in the book face universal predicaments: diminishing sources of energy, changing climates, burgeoning populations, poverty and conflict. Some are dealing with these crises locally, while many take a broader view.

The lines between different styles of architecture are blurring, Mr. Mathewson argues, as cultural borders fade and intercontinental migration of people and technology accelerates.

Mr. Mathewson believes that Scandinavia — with its emphasis on natural, organic forms — continues to produce some of the best residential architecture in the world.

In Africa, the country producing the continent's most exciting architecture is the one that has most actively pursued democratization, he says, pointing to South Africa's many dazzling residences.

In Oceania, the editor finds that the Australian outback, beaches of New Zealand and temples of Tahiti inspire modern — even abstract — architecture. Those contemporary arrangements, including open porches and sleeping areas — along with numerous windows — reflect the layouts of traditional huts and meeting houses.

Canada is represented by a weekend home on Lake Erie, a Quebec art collector's country house and a hilltop retreat in Nova Scotia.

Canadian architects include MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects of Halifax, Pierre Thibault Architecte of Quebec City, and the Toronto-based firms of Taylor Smyth Architects, Shim-Sutcliffe Architects and Diamond + Schmitt Architects.

Mr. Mathewson describes a weathering steel ravine house by Shim-Sutcliffe: "Materially rich, dark and abstract, it creates a clear threshold to the world within, to the site it creates and to the ravine edge over which it looks. The L-shaped house frames a reconfigured landscape created around shaped, tree-covered mounds and a sweeping meadow.

Imbedding itself into the centre of the house, the reflecting pool and swimming pool beyond form the intermediary between building and landscape, weaving reflected light, motion and sound into the heart of the home."

Mr. Mathewson also cites Ofis Architekti, a firm formed in Ljubljana, Slovenia, by Rok Oman and Spela Videcnik. He says it has emerged as one of the most creative new architectural practices in the former Yugoslavia.

He presents the firm's restructuring of Villa Vled, high above a mountain lake. The facades of the historic structure were refurbished, and seem to hover above a hypermodern, transparent glass main floor.

In Japan, Shinichi Ogawa & Associates were presented with an opportunity seldom offered there — the design of a residence (in Atami) with an unimpeded view of the sea. The result was Horizon House, which features a sliding glass window wall that allows inhabitants to completely open the dwelling to the sea.

In Oono, Japan, Tanijiri Makoto created an astonishing house perched on a hillock smack beside a train track and busy road. The house seems to thrust over the tracks, while a wall of windows provides an unimpeded view of every train rushing by.

"Cantilevering out the house mass from the hillside allows it to seemingly float above the site like a large sculptural piece."

The many similar locations in the book are fascinating.

The collection is not entirely original — descriptions of many of the houses have been published elsewhere — but readers with a love of architecture can spend hours immersed in innovative design and virtual visits to beautiful landscapes around the world.