Raul Barreneche has travelled the tropics all over the globe to bring together a collection of luxurious modern homes that combine modern technology with local, often exotic materials to produce rich designs of wood, metal, stucco and glass. These houses by such luminaries as Oscar Niemeyer, Gio Ponti, Geoffrey Bawa and Isay Weinfeld are airy and open, perfectly seamless continuums of indoor-outdoor space. Water and breezeways figure prominently, and 'green' eco-conscious features emerge naturally from the tropical design environment; what we have here is architecture's version of a tropical paradise.
This sophisticated survey of modern houses with open floor plans, exterior courtyards, sunny patios and cool stucco surfaces all touched by the exotic flavours of their tropical locales demonstrates that the combination of modern architectural form and tropical settings is extending and revitalizing modernism as never before.
With 240 illustrations in colour and black and white