I just finished reading Le Guin's Always Coming Home, which is the best example of Static worldbuilding I've come across in a long while. I've recently been building a world myself, and thinking, "So where do I draw the line at working out things like the geography, so I can get at the bits of story I'm most interested in?" and this is a book where Le Guin doesn't draw the line, where the thing she's most interested in is, or emerges from, the building of the place -- so she collaborates with a geologist, musicians, etc. to get it right. At the same time, she puts a great deal outside the scope of the book, deliberately; and she's a presence in the book herself, in dialogue with the people she's invented, so it's in the metafiction fish kettle too -- modified by the fact that the people in the book have different ideas about the imagined than we do.

I'm trying to think of books which occupy both camps, or which fail because they alternate incoherently. Catherine Valente's Palimpsest? But it's too long since I've read that to know which thing I think it's an example of.