m.o.r.e. Cabin Among 60 Groundbreaking Designs in New Architecture Book

Kariouk Architects’ m.o.r.e. Cabin is featured alongside some of the world’s most innovative homes in Taschen’s latest book, “Homes for Our Time: Contemporary Houses around the World Volume 3”.

The book assembles 60 projects from around the world based on how they strive to do better in ways that also yield beautiful architecture. Our m.o.r.e. Cabin is the sole project the editor selected from Canada, and it’s also one of the few that are specifically mentioned in the introduction.

This collection is more than a coffee table book. The title may lead the reader to expect fashion trends or a celebration of extreme wealth and luxury. Instead, it’s a careful assembly of homes that sincerely try to reduce the environmental and economic cost of housing, sometimes by utilising new technologies. For example, Mario Cucinella’s TECLA – Technology and Clay, is a 3D-printed house created entirely with raw earth. Other homes show innovative solutions for mitigating the effects of extremely hot and cold climates (which is one technique to make a home more environmentally sustainable) and for helping residents reconnect with nature on an everyday basis.

Home Design as a Medium of Progress

Unlike large commercial or public buildings, houses are almost always the vehicles for architects’ experimentation and ultimately, progress in the field. Huge, expensive projects get watered down by committees, but small houses in particular can be honed into specific research agendas.

If you look across the last century, we have examples like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian houses, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Eileen Gray’s E1027, and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. They are all socio-cultural commentaries and prototypes intended to foster additional experimentation against a status quo that typically relegates the actual residents to an afterthought.