challenges the common perception of modern architecture as the example of an internationalism which eradicates local traditions and transforms the globe into a faceless urban sprawl. The essays trace the vernacular in some of modernity's most paradigmatic sites—both real and imagined. They engage in a search for an idiom that mediates between place and space, the vernacular and the abstract in architecture, from its early phase and Hermann Muthesius via LeCorbusier's high modernism, to the contemporary movement of a "critical regionalism."