Architects House Themselves: Breaking New Ground

Featuring highly individualistic, innovative houses designed by architects for their own residences, this stimulating, lavishly illustrated sourcebook opens with the homes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius, Rudolph Schindler and Charles and Ray Eames. Webb ( The City Square ) then spotlights 40 additional recent dwellings throughout the U.S. and one in Canada. Reinterpreting New England vernacular, ocean-lover Bernard Wharton's house in Redding, Conn. is as trim and tightly planned as a yacht. Kenneth Neumann's home in Franklin, Mich., an abstract reworking in glass of colonial architecture, ``performs a disappearing act'' on a wooded slope. Weekend retreats, daring structures that cling to ``unbuildable'' sites and a house tailored to the needs of an extended family from Taiwan serve as proof that new constructions need not be standardized or predictable. (Mar.)