White Houses, published by Thames & Hudson, showcases the most striking and unusual all-white buildings from around the globe. Each house in the book represents innovative architecture with white surfaces used to create a light space with an emphasis on materiality. Written by art historian Philip Jodidio, the book offers a compelling look into a specific feature of modern architecture.
Sometimes seen as an absence of colour, white in fact reflects the purity of the entire spectrum. In the history of design, white houses often embody the bright, clean clarity associated with 20th-century giants Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Richard Meier.
White Houses presents the most striking, innovative and unusual white houses by contemporary architects, spanning the globe from Asia to the Americas. The featured houses represent every scale and a wide range of locations and terrains, from seaside retreats to space-saving urban homes and grand country residences. From radical new takes on traditional building forms in Latin America to state-of-the-art urban projects in Europe and Japan, each house employs the apparent simplicity of white to reflect light and accent materiality, pressing the frontiers of form to the point of abstraction. No longer an anonymous box, the contemporary white house is the embodiment of the architectural archetype, reinterpreted and refreshed.
