With his new, generously subtitled book, architecture and design writer Witold Rybczynski (who currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design) follows, in considerable detail, the transformation of a tract of agricultural land in rural Pennsylvania into a new housing development.

Based on the principles of traditional garden suburbs (such as Forest Hills Gardens in Queens) and modern neotraditional developments such as Seaside and Celebration (both in Florida), New Daleville is intended to be a carefully designed community. Such developments extol and support the virtues of increased density, reduced traffic, easy walking access to community facilities, and an emphasis on human scale and quality of home design and construction. Despite the lofty goals, however, the development has no shortage of problems.

Rybczynski renders New Daleville’s story in compulsively readable fashion, deftly handling a large cast of characters, and building suspense out of typically picayune details such as zoning meetings and calls for bids from potential builders. As with Tracy Kidder’s House, the tension of Last Harvest hinges on the fact that, in projects of this kind, failure is always a very real possibility. The stakes are very high indeed – not just for the builders, but for the community as a whole.

As readers might expect, Rybczynski interweaves this narrative with various historical and social insights into houses and community. From short histories of commercial development to capsule studies of the positive aspects of urban life (and how they can be translated to exurban living) to keen insights into the business of building, the economics of real estate development, and what makes a house a home, Rybczynski is clearly in his element. Last Harvest forms a perfect companion piece to his earlier book, The Most Beautiful House in the World.