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

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