What is the role of architecture if not to realize a shared vision of the “good life,” a vision that in the age of architectural modernism shaped—and was shaped by—a range of ideas about the home? With The Good Life , Iñaki Ábalos serves as our guide for a tour of seven iconic twentieth-century homes that represent various concepts for living. Some of the homes were actually built, while others were merely planned, painted, or created as part of a film set. We see Mies van der Rohe’s House with Three Patios , Martin Heidegger’s cabin in the Black Forest, Picasso’s Villa La Californie in Cannes, and the New York loft that Andy Warhol called The Factory . From the ultramodern geometric houses and gardens in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle , we travel to the famed hobby-kit house in Buster Keaton’s One Week and on to the sunny swimming pool and home in David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash . Ábalos guides readers through the key philosophical precepts that likely guided the creation of these homes, making insightful points about the relationship between ideas about a particular modern way of living and approaches to architecture and design. What he concludes is that modernism marks less a coherent triumph of positivism, as is often assumed, than a loose celebration of the radical pluralism of the twentieth century. A fascinating work by one of Spain’s most prominent architects, The Good Life presents a powerful picture of the concerns that guided the course of architectural modernism.