Avant-garde architects often use commissions for private homes to test radical building innovations. This makes residential architecture a great medium for understanding, among other things, how architects address contemporary politics and social justice, the important role played by female clients, the rejection of a previous generation's design ideology, and the problems of industrial expansion and globalization. This class reviews such topics through an investigation of the major contributions to residential design between 1880 and the present. Topics include Frank Lloyd Wright's Arts and Crafts prairie houses, European Art Nouveau, Le Corbusier's steamship-inspired concrete villas, Mies van der Rohe's Platonic Glass boxes, Robert Venturi's "complex and contradictory" reinterpretation of modernism, and Frank Gehry's deconstructive critique of the suburban tract house. Attitudes toward suburbanization, public housing, and sustainability also shape some of our discussions.