Now more than ever, architects and designers are crossing aesthetic borders, and redefining craft to suit their own creative needs, philosophies, and expectations often by commenting upon or challenging it. By transforming our notions of what might be considered crafted, today's practitioners have not only put a new spin on an ancient art; they have expanded our understanding of where and how the personal touch is found in the sometimes bewildering or inhospitable terrain of the contemporary aesthetic landscape. Featuring twenty-five residential, commercial, and institutional projects by major international design figures as well as the relatively unknown and up-and-coming this volume looks at what constitutes the craft influence in contemporary architecture and design. By turns luxurious and simple; time-honored and leading-edge; small-scale and monumental; unabashedly beautiful, surprisingly witty, socially adroit, and sublimely poetic, these projects are sure to give us a new appreciation of the pleasures of making and enlarge and enrich our understanding of the presence, and importance, of craft in all our lives.