[Image: Inside Tadao Ando?s studio in Osaka; photo by Kaita Takemura, via designboom].
Somewhere, despite the weather here, it?s spring. If you?re like me, that means you?re looking for something new to read. Here is a selection of books that have crossed my desk over the past few months?though, as always, I have not read every book listed here. I have, however, included only books that have caught my eye or seem particularly well-fit for BLDGBLOG readers due to their focus on questions of landscape, design, architecture, urbanism, and more.
For previous book round-ups, meanwhile, don?t miss the back-links at the bottom of this post.

1) The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History by Daniel Jütte (Yale University Press) Daniel Jütte?s The Strait Gate seems largely to have slipped under the radar, but it?s my pick for the most interesting architectural book of the last year (it came out in 2015). It has a deceptively simple premise. In it, Jütte tells the story of the door in European history: the door?s ritual symbolism, its legal power, its artistic possibilities, even its betrayal through basic crimes such as trespassing and burglary. He calls it ?a study of doors, gates, and keys and a history of the hopes and anxieties that Western culture has attached to them?; it is a way of ?looking at history through doors.?
Jütte describes locks (and their absence), city walls (and their destruction), marriage (and the literal threshold a newly joined couple...