The Irish Times

Those cheesy greeting cards that say a house is not a home have a point. While the word "house" conjures up bricks and mortar images, the word "home" resonates with the full repertoire of emotions and stories of lives lived. The image of a house is programmed into our minds at a young age. Preschoolers reasonably can't grapple with the term home, but they all draw roughly the same house no matter what type of accommodation they live in themselves - a rectangle with a steep roof, a spindly chimney and oddly placed windows. Intriguingly it is a house in France that owes much to that childish image that features on the front cover of Deyan Sudjic's new book Home, the twentieth century house. It was designed in 1993 by Herzog and de Meuron and in the photos in this beautiful-looking book it seems cold and forbidding, despite the glimpses of the lush green countryside. According to Sudjic, it illustrates one of the architectural directions that define the last decade of the twentieth century - the desire to make order out of chaos.