Mr. Rybczynski and Mr. Olin judge the villa as they find it today and in the context of the historical process that produced it, rather than through a filter of modernist criteria.

WSJ: An American Renaissance Gem

Mr. Rybczynski describes this trio, Paul Chalfin, F.

WSJ: An American Renaissance Gem

In his book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Witold Rybczynski describes this early form of home automation in a way that sounds like the 19th Century equivalent of a venture backed start-up.

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Mr. Rybczynski and Mr. Olin do an admirable job of conveying the history of Vizcaya, but their book is not one of those lavishly photographed, coffee-table architecture books that have become so common in recent years.

WSJ: An American Renaissance Gem

For such an apparently dull subject, Witold Rybczynski's brief history is a charming work that gracefully threads its way back to the origins of precision manufacturing and, in the process, the origins of the modern world.

ECONOMIST: Non-fiction

"Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, " by architect Witold Rybczynski and landscape architect Laurie Olin, is one of a number of popular and scholarly histories that in the past two decades have sought to redress this ideological imbalance.

WSJ: An American Renaissance Gem

Thus, says Mr Rybczynski in these lectures given at the New York Public Library in October 1999, people appreciate architecture, among other reasons, because it prompts them to think who they might have been in the past and how far removed they now may be from that age.

ECONOMIST: Architectural styles