When this book was originally published in 1998, Alice T. Friedman's recourse to letters, memoirs, and newspaper and magazine accounts charted relatively new territory for an architectural historian. The portraits of six modernist houses, interwoven with profiles of the creators and their clients, still make for engaging material. (A stray reference to the late Philip Johnson living at his Glass House "to this day" bears evidence that the text has not been updated for this paperback edition.) Friedman's revisionist narrative aims to show how the confluence of feminist thinking and the utopian social aims of modernist architecture caused a radical rethinking of domesticity. It's a fascinating thesis that holds interest beyond the case studies presented in this volume.

At her best, as in chapters featuring Truus Schröder and Constance Perkins, the actively engaged clients of Gerrit Rietveld and Richard Neutra, respectively, Friedman gives ample evidence of the congenial tugs of war that led to the creation of masterpieces and documents the satisfaction each woman got from living in her home. But in other chapters, Friedman strains to cast these women in a favorable light: Aline Barnsdall, in particular, comes across as someone too lost in mystical ideas about open-air theater to ever see the ambitious arts complex-cum-residence she commissioned from Frank Lloyd Wright come to fruition. Vanna Venturi, mother of architect Robert Venturi and client for his second completed building, and Gabrielle de Monzie, one of three clients for Le Corbusier's Les Terrasses in suburban Paris, seem like nonentities in the design phase of their homes.

Friedman's most ambitious chapter discusses Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson's Glass House/Guest House, perhaps the two greatest icons of modernist residential architecture. It explores in depth the souring of Mies' relationship with Edith Farnsworth (due to cost overruns and her realization of the glass box's minimalist severity), and then pans out to briefly discuss the era's prevailing sexual mores and debates about privacy. Friedman contrasts the Farnsworth House with one of Johnson's twin buildings that bears formal resemblance but functions quite differently as a residence.

Despite a somewhat didactic tone that makes for annoying repetitions, this book supports its claim that women decisively shaped modernist domestic architecture, leaving the reader clamoring for others to extend the analysis of this subject.