Books on architecture make handsome Christmas presents, and 2007 has produced a bumper crop.

Rarely has there been a more elegant and lucid survey of a great architect’s work than Eileen Harris’s The Country Houses of Robert Adam (Aurum Press, £40). The large format does justice to the Mozartian fecundity and inventiveness of Adam’s genius in creating the most dazzling of all English interiors. Adam stuns with his crispness of detail as well as his mastery of pattern and composition and Country Life’s large-format glass negatives and colour transparencies capture this superbly. As well as all Adam’s great country houses, Syon and Osterley, Kedleston and Harewood, extensive coverage is given to Adam’s town houses ingeniously planned for what he termed “the parade, the convenience and the social pleasures of life”. The text is as readable and absorbing as Adam’s own letters.

Rosemary Baird’s Goodwood Art and Architecture, Sport and Family (Frances Lincoln, £35) is a gorgeously illustrated production that also offers serious scholarship, lightly worn. As the curator of the Goodwood collections she has achieved an astonishing mastery of every aspect of the history of the house and its energetic owners. Each chapter is engagingly themed: art and anatomy (sporting paintings, notably Stubbs), shopping in Paris (think Sèvres and the finest Parisian cabinet makers). There is a fascinating vignette of the family’s Scottish properties, colossal Gordon Castle and the Hunting Lodge at Glenfiddich, both illustrated by Victorian watercolours. Like Chatsworth, Goodwood is a great estate in pristine condition buzzing with life throughout the year.

Britain’s Lost Cities by Gavin Stamp (Aurum Press, £25) is a brilliantly researched survey of the damage done by the Luftwaffe, politicians and town planners to civic architecture from Plymouth, Portsmouth and Canterbury to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. His text, as well as the numbingly evocative photographs, presents an agonising portrait of loss. Witness Coventry. In 1933 J. B. Priestley noted: “It is genuinely old and picturesque \ half-timbered and gabled houses that would do for the second act of the Meistersinger.” Seven years later the City Architect wrote the bombing was “a blessing in disguise. The jerries cleared out the core of the city, a chaotic mess, and now we can start anew”.

The galling toll of loss includes a mass of fine civic and commercial architecture that lent dignity and grandeur to provincial cities, much of it by distinguished architects such as Lockwood and Mawson and Charles Fowler, whose magnificent arch-roofed Lower Market in Exeter was destroyed in 1942. In Glasgow it is the postwar damage that torments, of street after street of stone-fronted Georgian houses as well as the gloriously spiky 1882 Grand Hotel destroyed in 1968 to make way for the sunken motorway that cuts the city in half. Greek Thomson’s A-listed Queen’s Park Terrace was demolished by the City Council in 1980-81. Plymouth is especially painful, where noble bomb-damaged terraces survived into the 1960s before being cleared to conform with the Abercrombie plan.

Great Modern Structures: 100 years of Engineering Genius by David Littlefield and Will Jones (Carlton Books £35) is packed with record-breaking skyscrapers, dams, bridges and stadiums. These include Lake Pontchartrain Causeway — at 23.9 miles the world’s longest over-water crossing — Dutch storm surge barriers and broadcasting towers. More historic engineering works include the Panama Canal, the 12.3m Simplon Railway Tunnel through the Alps, the Fiat Factory in Turin and the Farnborough windtunnels. The Troll A gas platform is shown being towed gently out to sea before being sunk into the seabed. The world’s largest wind turbine, 5M, stands in the Moray firth, served by a giant floating crane. In Stanford, California the 1.8-mile Linear Accelerator propels sub-atomic particles at close to the speed of light.

At the funky end is Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier (Frances Lincoln, £35). It certainly is the frontier in terms of adventurous construction and farflung sites. The mix ranges from tin tabernacles and mission halls to Nissen huts, giant hangars and the latest homes by Glenn Murcutt and Shuhei Endo. Star turns are the Italian prisoner-of-war chapel in Orkney, stilt houses near Darwin and Foreign Office Architects’ Bluemoon Aparthotel at Groningen, the Netherlands, which, when the (cast-iron) shutters are closed, looks like the ultimate fortified tardis.

The blockbuster of the year is Calatrava: Complete Works 1979-2007 by Philip Jodidio (Taschen £79.99), a 500-page folio volume with photographs of masterpieces such as the Lyon Airport TGV station, the Valencia Planetarium and the Athens stadium. Most tantalising is the unbuilt bridge over Poole Harbour which would have run Foster’s Millau Viaduct a close second. As both architect and engineer, Calatrava is uniquely qualified to build adventurous, athletic structures in a strongly personal style. His latest vision is for a slender 160- storey tower on Chicago’s lake shore to contain some 1,300 apartments.

An excellent stocking filler is John Murray’s London Above Eye Level (Frances Lincoln £9.99), an intriguing series of exotic sculptural and ornamental details on façades and roofs. Murray delights in beavers cavorting along Oxford Street, elephants in Kingsway, camel trains in Eastcheap and hippocamps (half horse, half fish) by Waterloo Bridge. He points with a certain relish to “a manual of murder techniques” in Victoria (crazed angels dispatching decidedly half-witted demons). The captions are at the back so you can quiz yourself and friends.

Anthony Emery’s Discovering Medieval Houses in England and Wales (Shire Publications, £10.99) is a distillation of his previous three volumes. Were battlements and towers for defence or show? Were great houses built for ancient families or new-made men? Were medieval houses cold and dark, or richly furnished and colourful? Emery suggests the claim that every woman in England had “coat, furs, quilts, table cloths, necklaces, wooden bowls and silver goblets” from France after Crécy was far from unfounded.

Marcus Binney’s In Search of the Perfect House is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £30.