What happens next in domestic architecture? New book Future Homes points the way forward

Many contemporary architectural monographs are more or less content to be beauty parades, offering up page after page of lavishly aspirational photography. Future Homes: Domestic Architecture in a Changing World neatly sidesteps accusations of aesthetic bias by casting its net far and wide, exploring not just dominant contemporary approaches but those firms and practitioners who are looking to what comes next.

Written by Ellie Stathaki, Wallpaper’s very own and highly experienced architecture & environment director – and a trained architect – Future Homes brings together work from across the globe, exploring every nook and cranny of what it means to shape a home. As well as interviews and images, the book includes drawings and details, effectively bridging the gap between glossy coffee table tome and inspirational volume.

Projects are drawn from a wide variety of places and practices, including Australia, Ecuador, India, Paraguay, Singapore and the UK, while the featured architects embrace emerging practices as well as more established names. They include Carlo Ratti Associati and Italo Rota, Italy, the UK’s Knox Bhavan, Studio Bark and AO-FT, Fernanda Canales in Mexico and Omar Gandhi Architects in Canada.

Key themes include materiality, technology and the perennial issue of climate and energy consumption. Stathaki also touches on the role of AI in the design process. The result is a book that’s unafraid to ask difficult questions of architecture, as well as architecture that is itself in open dialogue with a fast-changing world.

The very nature of home continues to shift as it has done since built shelter was first conceived. The difference is that our choices now come with more responsibility than ever before.