For most Americans the most important house in America is the White House. For architects it’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. It is revered because of its extraordinary design and because it demonstrates what is possible when a designer has a one in a million clients who is willing to leap into the great unknown and build a house that breaks with tradition in just about every way.

Architect Ed Binkley taps architectural traditions in his 2007 International Builders Show house, but not ones that most home buyers will recognize. Colonial, Victorian and Florida Mediterranean stylistic flourishes were eschewed for details that are clearly drawn from the work of two American architects who spent their careers pushing the envelope — Frank Lloyd Wright and Paul Rudolph.

Most American households own timesaving devices that would astound our great-great grandmothers who lived 100 years go. But few households have taken technology to the next level and surrounded themselves with equipment that can smooth out the rough edges of life. For example, massage by 22 spray nozzles in a shower, with water temperature programmed to match your mood.

An American original, the suburban ranch house of the late 1940s introduced new construction methods, a new way of incorporating large areas of glass that blur the distinction between indoors and outdoors, a very private back yard, and the open floor plan with fewer walls and several functions within one area of the house. These have influenced the design of nearly every house built since.

In Mountain House, Calif., Pulte Homes is betting that when a house feels like a home, buyers won’t care what it looks like. From a distance, each building in the firm’s Cambridge Place subdivision appears to be a very large house, but up close the buildings could best be characterized as the Rubik’s Cube solution — a huge cube made up of two-car garages and one- and two-story living units.

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is one of the world’s most famous houses. When it was completed in 1931, its spare look, flat roof and reinforced concrete framing were shocking; even today the house is still provocative. It was never widely copied, but many of its features, including large windows that fill a space with light and big multipurpose rooms, are common in new housing today.

Designed by the Mithun architectural firm in Seattle for the Dwelling Company and completed in 2002, a community of 50 cottages in Poulsbo, Wash., near Seattle, was built on a tight urban site with a project density of 15 units per acre. Though the houses are only eight feet apart, each has a vista by virtue of clever land planning.