It can seem that all the action in architecture today is in museums. The private house, which used to be the generator of experimentation and form-making, has been supplanted by the big, wealthy international art institution's expensive landmark building. Yet, the various manifestations of gallery architecture have all come from the private sphere.

The artist's converted industrial loft, now the pattern for urban living, became the model for "found space" exhibitions. The modernist white-cube house translated into the minimalist gallery. The salon, the drawing room, the grand house or palazzo - each has been drawn from the way art was displayed in a domestic setting. The museum itself developed from the domestic cabinet of curiosities. (See Sir John Soane's sublime dwelling in Lincoln's Inn Fields.) Thus, the home and the gallery exist in a symbiotic relationship, interdependent and closely related, fashions in one feeding through to inform the other.

No one understands this link better than architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, undisputed masters of the international contemporary art institution and guest curators of an exhibition opening at New York's Museum of Modern Art this month. "When art is in your home, a place where things are slower, cosier, art has a great impact," says Herzog. "We have to change the way we look at art, at its setting, otherwise we just don't see it any more."

He and de Meuron are best known for astonishing, architecturally inventive galleries. From London's cavernous Tate Modern to San Francisco's rusty De Young Museum, Minneapolis's Walker Gallery to Basel's odd, disturbing and wonderful Schaulager, they have consistently challenged and changed the way museum spaces are conceived and perceived. They have made the gallery itself into almost the main event so that, for instance, the filling of Tate Modern's awesome turbine hall has become one of the world's great standing challenges to artists.

However, like most Swiss architects, Herzog and de Meuron began their careers in housing, designing a series of extraordinary dwellings, many of which remain as fresh and influential as when they were built.

"We've done much less housing in recent years but it is the most basic architectural subject and also the most interesting," says Herzog. "Children naturally create spaces for themselves; nooks, crannies, places under tables. They are all versions of the two forms of house, the loft and the cave, which we also work with. The trouble is that, as much of our work was social housing, we were bound by an evenly spread mediocrity, cost and the size limitations of a bathroom. There is not much room for experimentation."

You would not have guessed it from their portfolio. Constantly pushing at the edges of taste, of symbol, of ornamentation and of space, the architects have steadfastly refused to adopt a housestyle, instead seeing (and numbering) each building, exhibition and unexecuted project as part of an ongoing process, a step in a bigger experiment. Parts of the practice's beautiful Basel office, a series of 19th century bourgeois villas crammed with rough working models and intricate, laser-cut sheets of curious materials, look halfway between a laboratory and the knocked-together rear of a film set.

There is one strain that has remained powerfully intact through their domestic projects, though - the house-shaped house. From the simple imagery of the 1979 Blue House in Oberwil through the modernist Alpine revival of their House for an Art Collector in Therwil to the 1997 house in Leyman, France, Herzog and de Meuron have explored a rich vein of archetypal forms that successfully blend the child's image of a blocky house - including door, windows and a steep-pitched roof in all the right places - with an avant-garde intelligence.

Still, in each example, some part of the vocabulary is changed or subverted. Sometimes the shift may be in the material. Perhaps the whole thing is incongruously constructed of concrete. Maybe Alpine, cuckoo-clock half-timbering is introduced on an otherwise minimalist building; or a heavy structure is perversely lifted on an apparently free-floating platform; or the undulating sections of rolling shutters form a façade as they do at the beautiful social housing apartment block on Paris's aptly named Rue des Suisses.

At other times, scale and symbol are altered. At the overwhelming Schaulager, the architects have inserted a house-shaped block, a Monopoly property, in front of the huge buiding not only to give scale but also to add a touch of dark, surreal humour, anchoring the alien structure into its residential neighbourhood.

Each architectural move makes the viewer question traditional typologies, accepted notions of how things should look and why they might look the way they do. Each house is the equivalent of a gallery that allows you to perceive the art in a fresh way, to squeeze more enjoyment and meaning from the familiar fruits of form.

Herzog and de Meuron's international success, as arguably the most influential, popular and consistently challenging architects working in the world today, has ensured that they are being employed as a brand of quality for more institutions. Current projects include the second stage of London's Tate Modern, the Parrish Museum in New York's Southampton and the dazzling Olympic Stadium in Beijing, a birds' nest of structural spaghetti bound to become the next most-talked-about building.

But they are also working on a more modest, residential structure, which has nonetheless caused an international stir - a compact and urbane block of condominiums on Bond Street, New York, for developer Ian Schrager, of Studio 54 and design hotel fame.

There is nothing new in big architectural names being dragged into Manhattan housing. Richard Meier, Gwathmey Siegel, John Pawson (in Schrager's Gramercy Park development) and even Frank Gehry have been used as designers, and as marketing tools, for top-end schemes, with variable results. But 40 Bond doesn't have the feel of a building where architects have simply been brought in to up property values. It's not as if Herzog and de Meuron needed the work and one senses that Schrager picked them almost for fun. "The great thing about Jacques is you never know what you're going to get," he says. "With most architects you have to push. Jacques you have to hold back."

Rather significantly, 40 Bond is the Swiss team's first job in New York and it is the city that preoccupies them. "The question," says Herzog, "is how does the condo affect the city? I think it can have a huge effect. Ian has proved with his hotels that he can contribute to the culture of architecture with the creation of a type of hotel that didn't exist before. 40 Bond . . . is a very constrained project, in size and type, but sometimes the less latitude there is, the more freedom there can be. So we need to ask: 'how can you make architecture out of this?' We were interested in stacking two existing typologies: the brownstone town house [with direct access from the street] and the condominium."

The result is an interesting collision: five triplex town houses with 22 apartments piled on top of them. The façade of huge chunks of structural cast glass - a reference to the capacious windows made possible by the iron-framed construction of the area's original warehouses - is both powerful and understated, an ironic inversion of the commercial universality of the thin curtain wall. But the fences and gates will be most eye-catching. Herzog describes them as "the building's signature" and they do serve as a kind of tag. The neurotic, squiggly patterns of the cast metal panels (half fence, half net-curtain) were generated using sections of local graffiti, bonding them to the culture and aesthetic of the street.

With a setback distinguishing the houses from the condos and planted terraces shown in the renderings, 40 Bond is reminiscent of another wonderful attempt at genre-busting a century ago: Henri Sauvage's superb 1925 block on Paris's Rue des Amiraux, in which the individually accessed apartments are grouped around a swimming pool. It is an interesting, eloquent scheme that builds on Herzog and de Meuron's previous residential work, questioning traditional types and juggling with existing models.

Yet it is far less radical than the firm's extravagant, often brilliant gallery designs. Why? "Museums reached a point where they needed to be reinvented because people had stopped seeing the art. As architects we can question the norms in these buildings and see how this changes behaviour," Herzog says. "Housing has seen less innovation . . . because people are conservative. They like certain things the way they are. Condos, for example, are limited by the idea of being just a big stack of little homes. In Bond [Street] we are able to do a really interesting building on a big scale using an approach that doesn't exist in New York. But, of course, it also has this commercial side - and good taste can be limiting on a project like this. We are not able to really experiment with everyday life."

Modern architecture may have been kick-started by residential villas and towers but, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, architect-designed homes are still rare. A scheme like 40 Bond should therefore be savoured. In its blend of the theatrical, the trashy and its questioning of typology, it represents a critical next step in the oeuvre of an architectural duo that has been distracted from housing for too long.

Herzog and de Meuron, tel: +41 6138 55757