Greg Goldin

The open house presenting Philippe Starck’s latest offered — by invitation only — an irresistible chance to peer into the good life, and maybe mooch a few interior-design ideas. Not that you’d know it pulling up on Moore Street, in Mar Vista, across Palms Boulevard from Gregory Ain’s pitch-perfect modernist......

There’s nothing accidental about a chance conversation on a city bus, even on the commuter special heading west on Wilshire Boulevard before sundown on a Friday evening. When, from the back, a voice called out, “Hey, do you know how far it is to Westwood?” I became suspicious. No one,......

The Pacific Design Center (8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, 310-657-0800) has always seemed an unapproachable building, a visually impenetrable leviathan so out of scale that, as you pass by, you feel you’re about to be crushed or swallowed. Despite its bright ocean-going blue, it feels lifeless. Cesar Pelli, the building’s......

Courtesy of NOAA Central LibraryOn February 4, 1884, John Ruskin delivered a lecture titled “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.” Ruskin, who was one of those all-knowing Victorians, had noticed a distinctly new “plague-cloud,” which had never before been described. Neither modern meteorologists nor sharp-eyed poets, from Homer to Wordsworth,......

Illustrations by Max KornellFrom the moment curing the smog curse became a matter of public policy some 58 years ago, the letters and suggestions to officialdom started pouring in. Ragged-trousered inventors, reputable patent holders, trained chemists and engineers, garage dabblers and grease monkeys, dreamers, hucksters, crackpots and housewives offered hundreds......

Photo by Reed HutchisonEarly one morning last week, two members of UCLA’s facilities management crew cut out a small patch of grass in the middle of a wide lawn directly behind Royce Hall. The men, both named Mike, exposed a concrete pad with four 1-inch-diameter, stainless-steel bolts — and then......

Illustration courtesy Urban PartnersDan Rosenfeld, of Urban Partners, is one of the city’s leading developers. His firm spearheaded the Caltrans District 7 Headquarters, at First and Main, in downtown, and he is building the urban village that will spring up above and around the Wilshire-Vermont Red Line subway station late......