Le Corbusier, Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, Italy, 1925

For those of us who are housebound, this model home, replete with built-in tree, is a dream come true. The white, geometric structure was made by the Swiss architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, and although the original was destroyed a year later, a faithful replica was built in Bologna in 1977. It was designed as a modular dwelling that could be combined with others like it to form an apartment block. The intersecting tree—which exits through an open hole in the attic—stood on the architects’ designated exhibition space and thus had to be worked into the design: the living embodiment of working around a problem.