Those cheesy greeting cards that say a house is not a home have a point. While the word "house" conjures up bricks and mortar images, the word "home" resonates with the full repertoire of emotions and stories of lives lived. The image of a house is programmed into our minds at a young age. Pre-schoolers reasonably can't grapple with the term home, but they all draw roughly the same house no matter what type of accommodation they live in themselves - a rectangle with a steep roof, a spindly chimney and oddly placed windows.

Intriguingly it is a house in France that owes much to that childish image that features on the front cover of Deyan Sudjic's new book Home, the twentieth century house. It was designed in 1993 by Herzog and de Meuron and in the photos in this beautiful-looking book it seems cold and forbidding, despite the glimpses of the lush green countryside. According to Sudjic, it illustrates one of the architectural directions that define the last decade of the twentieth century - the desire to make order out of chaos. It also illustrates another feature of the architect-designed houses that make their way into coffee table books. They are exclusive. Not only is their very existence an unsubtle reminder of the wealth of the owner but their design usually bears absolutely no resemblance to the type of house that most people live in. They are architects' calling cards and an opportunity for mavericks to strut their design stuff. They alienate most people outside the design professions because once they are off the drawing board they are often too pure, too much of a house machine (to use Le Corbusier's expression) to accommodate the detritus of modern living. To become, in other words, a home. In this century, but more particularly since the birth of the modern movement after the first world war, 20 or so houses have emerged as defining the architectural style of the decades in which they were built. In the 1920s, it was Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie, in the 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House and in the 1970s it was Michael Graves' own house in New Jersey. These houses and 17 others are shown in the book and, helpfully, outline floor plans are provided. The value of this book is that they are all together and so allow a study of how generations of architects have approached the business of designing the family home during the century. Also in the book are 50 houses that the author regards as looking towards the future. Some have already been built, such as Irish architects O' Donnell and Tuomey's house in Navan, others are still in the planning stages. While the houses don't really satisfy the book's title of "Home", the essays accompanying each decade do. This book started out as the catalogue for an exhibition in Glasgow of the same name and the essays which are written by Sudjic make it worth the cover price for their accessibility and their broad design overview.

Home - The twentieth-century house, by Deyan Sudjic, is published by Laurence King Publishing, £30 stg