Wendy Gilmartin

At the busy corner of Olympic and Sawtelle sits a banal retail center that's typical of Los Angeles' low commercial-development standards, complete with all the elements of conventional, early-'90s design and construction. You've got your beige block, your beige stucco, your storefront glass, your copper and teal accents. But this......

Seems like everybody hates the Beverly Center. A local "landmark" of sorts, the Beverly Center has been regularly mocked for decades due to its downright fugliness, impenetrable facades that block out the sun, and awkward siting along the Los Angeles/Beverly Hills border......

L.A.'s got a lot of buildings coated with black glass bleck -- like the horrendous eyesore at Sony Pictures Plaza in Culver City, the Olympia Medical Plaza near San Vicente and Olympic and this newly reopened BBCN bank (formerly the Nara bank, which merged last fall with Center Bank to......

Everyone knows L.A. sits atop a vast reserve of petroleum sludge and stink (hence the La Brea Tar Pits, the methane vents, the ever-bobbing drills along La Cienega in Baldwin Hills, etc.), but would you ever suspect that's the reason for this sad, drooping, pastel-colored tower on the Beverly Hills/Century......

The building that housed the LAPD's headquarters between 1955 and 2009 starred in TV shows like Dragnet in its heyday, but its slow, 50-year slide into disrepair gave it a real-world stigma that's left it tarnished and crumbling from the inside out -- most obviously because the community doesn't care......

There's a Waylon Jennings song called "Too Dumb for New York, Too Ugly for L.A.," and that goes for these twin towers, dubbed Elleven and Luma (yes, that's how it's spelled), in downtown's quickly developing and gentrifying Southpark district too......

No doubt oodles of festive fun have been had within this faux fortification in the heart of the Valley. But Anoush's banal, mixed references to the gateways and stonework of historic Roman, Persian and Islamic architectural forms is confused at best, tacky at worst, and amounts to a cultural stereotype......

Did you ever go to a SuperCuts and ask for the cheapest haircut? 816 Pacific Ave. in Venice is the building equivalent of that bad decision. Or maybe you've been the lucky recipient of one of those free do's from a local beauty school -- the kind that leaves you......

Between Frank Gehry's house, the Bergamot Station complex and countless other condo developments, parking structures and strip malls around Santa Monica, the city could stand to implement a 10-year ban on corrugated metal-clad buildings......

Common thinking is that architects are predominantly old white dudes (and they mostly are), but the Chinese American Museum's exhibition "Breaking Ground: Chinese American Architects in Los Angeles (1945-1980)" highlights four astonishing designers who eclipsed the profession's exclusionary demographic and changed L.A.'s look and feel in the 1950s and '60s......