Although Daniel P. Gregory's The New Farm was slated for publication long before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, I have encountered no book that better evokes the longings so many of us have felt under lockdown: for fresh air, real solitude, and uncluttered and intentional spaces to inhabit. Enjoyed in the crowded confines of a suburban home office amid interruptions from family and pets, the book presents a seductive vision of modern farm life, of agrarian simplicity sheltered and structured by buildings whose modern lines are tempered with reassuring vernacular precedents. In the course of a thematic introduction and sixteen lushly illustrated case studies, Gregory presents an argument for a new organic style that architecturally materializes the literal translation of agriculture as “care of the soil” (14).Gregory's prose, honed to a rhythm of cozy familiarity at Sunset magazine, is approachable and amiable, inviting the reader to ride shotgun on a rambling road trip across rural North America, Europe, and Australia. Among the people whose stories animate these places are a nurse anesthetist turned poultry farmer, a “tech-preneur” whose lavender fields are harvested by university student “ambassadors,” a third-generation Utah farmer with a penchant for hydroponics, and heiress/feminist/philanthropist Abby Rockefeller (who also contributes the foreword).The introduction establishes Gregory's curatorial intentions as both aesthetic and ethical, namely, to define an approach to cultivation and the architectural forms that best embody that approach: “The term architecturally modern working farm might make you think that we are talking about a sort of agricultural International Style or the farm as factory…. Instead, though the farms in this book certainly have International Style DNA, we are defining modern more broadly, to encompass a wide range of architectural idioms as well as practice of organic farming and sustainability” (22). To provide context and precedent for that “wide range,” the introduction conjures a coastal and predominantly postwar architectural genealogy. Rooting this lineage in his own family history, Gregory commences with a Bay Region style farmhouse in the Santa Cruz Mountains that once belonged to his grandparents, designed by William Wurster ca. 1927. Other California points of inspiration, such as Sea Ranch and Cakebread Cellars, are linked to East Coast brethren such as the gastronomic paradise of Stone Barns Center in New York. Interwoven with these canonical sites are some less familiar examples—for instance, the seaside structures of McLeod Kredell Architects’ Island Design Assembly workshop in Maine, which hover between ephemerality and permanence. Within these opening pages, Gregory establishes motifs that recur throughout the volume: abstracted gables, weathered wood, and local vernaculars elongated, deconstructed, and recombined.A short companion essay anchors each of the image-driven case studies that follow. Architectural drawings mingle with rich color photography, sourced largely from the architects and owners themselves. Despite the variety of different photographers represented, the book retains a surprising visual cohesion. Geography largely dictates the volume's organization: the first eight farms are situated within the United States and the next seven are international, including sites in Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia. The series begins and ends on the West Coast of the United States, with the final case study returning the reader to California for a concluding stroll through an olive orchard on the site of a former dairy ranch.The book's greatest strength is its ability to invite the reader into a place, quickly sketch the landscape and buildings, and anchor people, animals, and agricultural processes within that topography. In its most effective case studies, the relationship between architecture and activity comes to life through designer Benjamin English's deft layout. For example, in the chapter on Abby Rockefeller's Churchtown Dairy in Hudson River Valley, New York, the panoramic interior of the wooden round barn becomes a cathedralesque centerfold between pages that zoom out to provide a sweeping aerial view of the full dairy complex and then back in to depict the intimate labor of dairy farming. Here, as throughout the book, the reproduced architectural drawings of the site provide subtle insight into the viewpoint of the designers. At Churchtown, the site plan is appropriately quaint and pictographic—a contrast to the photorealistic renderings provided by other firms.The book's organization necessarily invites a formalist comparison between the U.S. examples and their international counterparts. Many of the U.S. case studies derive from a precisionist variant of rural modernism à la Charles Sheeler's Bucks County barns—gables and flat, textured surfaces machined in lines that blur the distinction between agrarian and industrial.1 The international examples, particularly the European ones, are more materially daring—as in the woven lattice of hazel trees lining a wall of Georg Schmid's cow barn near Basel (123) and the striking two-tone Douglas fir of the Oosterhout Farm at Rijswijk, south of Amsterdam (128).For the architectural historian, Gregory's short essays are poetic vignettes whose subtext is left to the reader to decode. The aim is not historical comprehensiveness, though history percolates through the text and images. Take Prugger Farm, a combination house and barn in northern Italy, sited near “a Mussolini-era bunker, where the children like to play” (114). Against this backdrop, Gregory compares the building's processional ramps and cube-like structure to the Villa Savoye. There is much for the historian to unpack in this description, from the European tradition of people and animals living together under one roof to the multiple valences of modernism in Italy during World War II. Of note, most of the historical references in the case studies draw on the history of modern architecture generally rather than on the specific intersection of modernism and farming—I kept waiting in vain for a reference to Hugo Häring's iconic Gut Garkau (1922–26), near Lübeck, Germany.But beneath these layers of formal allusion, there is a deeper argument at play about what the contemporary farm could and should be, one that remains largely implicit in this text. First, The New Farm reifies the small family farm as the container of key cultural values. This insistent notion snakes through much of modern U.S. history, from the eighteenth-century Jeffersonian yeoman to nineteenth-century transcendentalism to 1930s New Deal policies meant to battle sweeping farm consolidation and industrialization to our contemporary imaginary. Now, as always, that vision of the small family farm comes embedded with racial and socioeconomic implications. Indeed, despite all of the admirably green agriculture presented in this book's pages, the occupants are overwhelmingly white and not infrequently upper- or upper-middle-class. Farmers who can afford to hire (or are themselves) architects are a rather select group.Connected to this bourgeois slant is the related trope of “getting back to the land.” In describing a time-lapse animation of a seaside sheep ranch under construction in Tasmania, Gregory asserts that the filmmakers capture “the modern farm as dreamscape, the ultimate balm for busy urbanites” (167). This description is not too far from The New Farm taken as a whole, which translates the atmosphere of aspirational modernism—familiar to consumers of Dwell magazine or the long-running BBC series Grand Designs—to an agrarian context. It is a vision that today is realizable for the privileged few, but that a century ago was merely the architectural face of a technological fantasy.In the early twentieth century, “getting back to the land” was synonymous with hardship, with giving up urban amenities in favor of Thoreauvian simplicity. Frank Lloyd Wright, Albert Frey, Wallace K. Harrison, and others who count a “modernist farm” within their canons, envisioned farms that came equipped with the luxuries of urban life—offering both the chance to reconnect with the soil and the ability to enjoy leisure time through the use of modern and electrified conveniences.2 Even in these earlier visions, sleek, abstracted architecture was the material expression of that elevated, comfortable “back to the land” lifestyle: the symbol of farming for pleasure rather than for subsistence.In some ways, then, the eponymous “new farm” does not feel so new at all. Many of the same cultural anxieties and yearnings that stimulated the architectural discourse around modern farms a century ago are still present today, amplified by a polarized climate in the United States in which “organic” and “smallholder” farming takes on dimensions of class and identity politics. In this bifurcated, post-Trump nation, The New Farm: Contemporary Rural Architecture almost seems to demand a follow-up volume of nearly the same title: The New Farm: Contemporary Urban Architecture. Indeed, in recent years, talented designers and architects have nurtured revolutionary urban and community farming efforts, such as Sweet Water Foundation in Chicago and Detroit Cultivator on the site of the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm.3 Rooted in many of the same agricultural values and practices as their rural “new farm” cousins, these models add “care of the people” to “care of the soil,” manifesting equity in an explicit pursuit of universal food security and racial justice.