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Photo © Steven Kovich. AR: What is the role of poetry in contemporary life? Billy Collins: It is a vital but minor one. Poetry isn’t for everyone; it suffers from the competition of other louder and more immediately glamorous forms of information transferal like television. We have a National Poetry Month in April, but usually if you have a day or a month or a week devoted to something, it’s a sign of its neglect. Many people can do without poetry because they have been driven away from it in high school, but it’s very much alive and well. There

An island nation where the cool and the ordinary flourish together. Flexibility has long been a guiding principle of Japanese architecture. Consider Japan’s ongoing use of sliding doors or screens to shape fluid interiorspace. These four very different books about Japanese architecture since the 1980s reveal new twists in that heritage of design, many brought about by surprising fusions of vernacular materials and new technology. All of them balance accounts of quintessential Japanese architectural developments—a house with a Shintoshrine at its heart, for example—with an array of ideas applicable globally. Click the image above for details about each book mentioned

By Jonathan Coulson, Paul Roberts, and Isabelle Taylor. Routledge, 2010, 264 pages, $125 This ambitious history chronicles campus design from the founding of the first European universities in the 11th century until last year. Although buildings for higher education are often among the most significant ones we build, surprisingly few good studies of them exist. There are numerous books on individual campuses, some good ones on architects who design college buildings (such as Robert A. M. Stern on Campus), and plenty of guides for facilities managers (even this one has a chapter on how to plan a campus). But only

November 2011 Five Los Angeles cultural institutions shed new light on mid-20th-century design efforts. Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980—a collaboration among 60 cultural institutions across Southern California—is a grand bazaar, as eclectic, wide-ranging, and uneven as the period of art it celebrates. Initiated by the Getty Foundation, which provided $10 million in grants, this effort engages venues of radically different scales and aspirations to focus on the evolution of the Los Angeles art scene in the decades after World War II. With nearly every institution in on the act—from major museums to university galleries—art takes on a fluid

November 2011 Getting an architecture degree is expensive. Is it worth it in a recession? If bookshelves are to be believed, it has become fashionable to knock the way schools teach architecture. The latest this fall is humorous—The Real Architect’s Handbook: Things I Didn’t Learn in Architecture School, from Guy Horton and Sherin Wing. It dispenses cheeky wisdom such as, “If you already have a B.Arch., consider further education in a different field. Your M.Arch. can’t make a real contribution to the field if you’re just showing off software skills.” Illustration: Dan Page These writers might be on to something.

December 2011 In a global market, efficiency and speed are not enough. The economic downturn of 2008 signaled the beginning of a dramatic period of global economic realignment in the future of architecture practice. Not only has China become the most vibrant market for architecture, but the demands placed on practitioners in various developing markets have also fundamentally begun to change the way architecture is designed and delivered at home and abroad. Images by Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong Above: DavidClovers' solid-surface wall and window prototype was exhibited in Los Angeles in 2010. Top: Andrew Bromberg of Aedas is designing the

Edited by Karla Britton, Yale University Press, 2011, 248 pages, $50 This inter-faith overview of contemporary religious architecture, distilled from a 2007 Yale University School of Architecture symposium, showcases 20 essays by architects, historians, and theologians. And the architects steal the show. Outstanding insights from the likes of Stanley Tigerman, Richard Meier, Steven Holl. Zaha Hadid, and Peter Eisenman make half of this book illuminating, alas, the latter half. Britton’s rambling but informative prologue traces the roots of 21st century religious architecture to Le Corbusier (from whom the book takes its title) and Louis Kahn, who introduced a sense of