I consider myself very fortunate that I have managed to live in a few modernist housing blocks of high architectural quality  — spatially stimulating, well-built, and materially rich, and designed in a spirit of generosity and optimism. As an architect, this is the next best thing to being able to design my own house, and as a socialist, I like to at least pretend that I am part of the political project such housing represents. The transition between admiring and visiting, and then actually residing in a modern dwelling has taught me much about how such forms behave on an everyday level.

It is a cliché of architecture that one must visit a building to appreciate it, which is a tall order  — we ‘consume’ architecture largely through images, and it takes a substantial amount of travel to become even moderately exposed to great buildings. But even in visiting, one so often is reduced to admiring the exteriors of private buildings, wondering what tricks have been played inside. This skin-deep experience serves its purposeworks when one is appreciating a city, travelling around and through a civic landscape of facades, but for domesticity it is deeply restrictive. Architects get around this by learning the language of drawings, becoming adept at visualising space by ‘reading’ plans and sections, but this is a specialised skill undeveloped in most people.

Stefi Orazi, a graphic designer by trade, has for the last decade been publishing a series of books that delve into her love of modernist domestic design, offering a vision of the modernist life that attempts to communicate its potential for joy and aesthetic satisfaction. From Modernist Estates (to which I contributed an essay) onward, Orazi’s books have combined archive history with quality photography and interviews with residents, going beyond the often dry way that architects describe the objects of their work. But in doing so a set of contradictions tend to flood in  — it can in some cases be more than a little galling to read about people’s passion for their beautifully designed ex-council flat if you know that they’ve paid for it in cash, for example. The passion for the architecture is clear, but the looming shadow of the psychedelically dysfunctional housing market can soften the enthusiasm.

Which is why Orazi’s latest book, Modernist Escapes, is somewhat different. Born out of a series of retreats to modernist properties towards writing up deadlines, it is an edited collection of modernist domestic architecture that is available to rent, stay in, or simply visit. It’s a global study, largely focused on Europe and North America, but taking in Latin America, and with a few scattered entries from Australasia, Israel, and Japan. This isn’t a purely scholarly selection, which is refreshing, and the entries through-out the book range from some of the most famous buildings in twentieth-century architecture, to rare houses built by architects for themselves that are now available as holiday homes. Each house has a short history, some lush photographs, and information on how to get inside  — this is a functional travel guide as much as anything else.

A key thing that strikes one here is the preponderance of modern architecture in a rural setting. There are many villas buried into forests or cantilevered out over rocky precipices before panoramas, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s utterly iconic Falling Water (guided tours only), to Peter Aldington’s house in Devon (bookable through the UK’s Landmark Trust). The houses are often highly romantic, with stark geometries overgrown by foliage, an attractive tendency somewhat unfairly lampooned online by the term ‘ecobrutalism’. But this also speaks to one of the major tensions in the history of modernism, that an architecture that from the outset set itself the task of solving the housing crises of the nineteenth-century city, would see so many of its most important experiments in the form of one-off villas and private commissions.

Highlights of the selection include Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery in eastern France, one of the key buildings of the mid-twentieth century, where you can stay with a skeleton crew of friars, or the Van Wassenhove House by Juliaan Lampens in Belgium, one of the most uncompromising statements of brutalist domesticity ever built. Throughout, the selection includes villas, apartments, hotels, halls of residence, basically everything besides the public housing that would be modernism’s biggest legacy worldwide.

Stepping aside from questions of housing and politics, what you see in this architecture is largely about physical experience: flowing spaces, control of natural light, and sophisticated, blurred boundaries between outdoors and indoors. Compared to more traditional house types, there are ways of living that are implied by these changes, both in terms of domestic relationships and leisure, but also coexistence with nature, that are of ever greater importance now. And if you aren’t already convinced, then this guide might give you that important first step inside.