At this year’s Monterey Design Conference, hosted by AIA California in October, the audience of 800-plus architects heard from Herb Greene, the nonagenarian designer of the extraordinary Prairie House (above), built for his family in 1961 outside Norman, Oklahoma. Greene, whose mentor was Bruce Goff, designed several houses for clients who shared his open spirit (he then quit architecture at the age of 51), but this house is his most wondrous. “I wanted to make it like a creature that hung over the prairie,” he has said. Clad outside in feathers of wood and inside with shingles—and sited to be protected from the harshest winds but open to the setting sun—the “creature” (some call it a chicken, which Greene doesn’t like) speaks across the years, both as sustainable architecture rooted in its place, and as a wholly original work of art.