In the 1992/93 academic year, the Dutch architect Joost Meuwissen gave a series of lectures at the then Technical University of Karlsruhe that has gone down in history. In it, he sought to "liberate the typology of dwelling from its classificatory limitation in favor of an analysis of architecture that emerges from particular ideas of dwelling in different environments and with different frameworks." His understanding of housing as a laboratory for architecture that can give rise to new forms, styles, or even paradigms is expressed in this. The book based on this lecture series, first published in 1995 and further revised by Meuwissen himself in 2016, condenses his understanding into a tour d'horizon through the history of architecture from antiquity to the late 20th century. Reading it makes clear that s.