Timely…In Houses: Modern Natural, Natural Modern (Rizzoli, $60), author Ron Broadhurst presents beautiful structures well meshed within landscapes that range from areas around balmy, humid Mumbai to crisp Alpine heights in Switzerland. Plan, section and elevation drawings as well as photographs amplify the lucid text and make the coffee-table book a useful tool with which to design an eco-friendly - albeit expensive - home.

An authoritative volume on the most innovative and environmentally sensitive new residential design. This carefully curated presentation of new and recent houses represents the vanguard of architects creating innovative structures that maintain a sensitive relationship to their natural contexts. Ron Broadhurst has selected projects on five continents demonstrating the inexhaustible potential of the modern house to enter into a dialogue with nature, either as an extraordinary object within the landscape or as an essay in environmental sustainability, or both. Featured here is work by such design luminaries as Kengo Kuma in China, Sean Godsell in Australia, and Allied Works Architecture in the United States. With exceptional color photography, the book presents houses created with sustainability and carbon footprint in mind, as well as houses constructed on spectacular sites. Some houses incorporate the cutting edge of environmentally sensitive design; some radically rethink the use of "traditional" materials such as wood and stone. A comprehensive collection, Houses: Modern Natural/Natural Modern demonstrates uniquely of-the-moment architecture and interiors and offers a vision of how we will think of the relationship between houses and the natural landscape in the decades to come.