The House Across Climates: Thirteen Dwellings from the Bunong Round House to the Cube House

The simplest plan on the path: a circular house of straw with a thatched grass roof and flattened bamboo walls, one common room around a central fire and one doorway for daylight. It also keeps the community's ancient ceramic jars and ceremonial gongs, so the single room is both home and treasury.

From Northern Thailand's Lan Na region, two compartments share one platform raised on stilts against flooding. Its name comes from the kalae, a carved piece about half a meter long projecting from the gable peak, and the roof is oriented along the cardinal directions, usually facing north or south.

The chief's residence of the Nias people shows a house as a statement of rank. A roof rising to about fifty feet sits on massive ironwood piles with diagonal bracing, which gives real earthquake resistance, and the only way in is a narrow staircase with a small trap door above.

The working rural home. A farmhouse is the primary living quarters of an agricultural property, and its form varies by region, from the American rectangular plan around a central fireplace to the Low German house built around a central hall and the Italian courtyard form descended from the Roman villa.

Where conifer forest was plentiful, horizontal logs were interlocked at the corners by notching. As the wood dries it shrinks and develops small surface cracks called checks, which are normal rather than a defect. Norway exported numbered prefabricated log houses from the 1880s through the 1920s.

A regional house type of the Bergisches Land in Germany, recognizable by black timber framing, white plaster infill, green shutters and grey black slate facades. The finest townhouse examples date from 1750 to 1850, and around 1900 conservation efforts began promoting the type as a regional emblem.

A rural Alpine dwelling turned into a fashion. Inspired by Swiss chalets, the style emerged in the Romantic era and spread across Europe and to North America, marked by gabled roofs with wide eaves, exposed beams, large brackets, balconies and brightly painted weatherboard.

The opposite end of the scale from the farmhouse: a large house at the center of an estate, the rural seat of a landed family with indoor and outdoor staff. Usually unfortified, unlike earlier castles, hundreds were demolished in the twentieth century as taxes, war and agricultural depression took their toll.

A hybrid born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, mainly between 1895 and 1920, blending Spanish Creole and neoclassical architecture. Raised foundations ventilate the wood and stucco houses, whose broad columned porches and wrought iron balconies suit a hot climate.

A reaction against Victorian ornament, named for Gustav Stickley's 1901 magazine The Craftsman. It favored simple forms, natural materials and handcrafted woodwork for modest middle-class homes, and in Southern California from about 1905 its small bungalows earned the name California bungalow.

A close relative of the Craftsman house, popular from the mid-1890s to the late 1930s. Its boxy, two and a half story massing with four large rooms to a floor, a center dormer and a wide front porch maximizes interior space on a small city lot.

The postwar answer to housing and the car. These boxy two or three story apartment houses of the 1950s and 1960s, found mainly in Southern California and the Sun Belt, shelter street-front parking beneath an overhang, which can leave a structurally vulnerable soft story.

The path ends with an experiment. Piet Blom tilted each cube on its corner atop a hexagonal pylon, first in Helmond between 1974 and 1977 and then in Rotterdam, where 38 standard houses and two super-cubes stand. The angled walls leave about a quarter of the interior unusable.