Wendy Gilmartin

Could it be they ordered the wrong number of stone tiles and then had to make up a pattern for the front of this Culver City gem? Some smart contractor came up with this ingenious plan: Make it look intentional to leave the upper half of the crap-brown stucco exposed......

When asked why he preferred living and working in Los Angeles instead of other major cultural hubs like New York and Paris, artist John Baldessari once said, "I live here because L.A. is ugly... If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art? I always have......

Feast your eyes on the future. By 2015, the bustling, glowing corner of 7th & Figueroa downtown will have replaced the just-shuttered Wilshire Grand hotel with this concoction of stores, ads and vague glowing glass volumes......

The Days Inn at Santa Monica Blvd. and Stanford St. stands tall on its corner as a sickly pastel monument to long-tarnished Miami Vice dreams......

Thanks to Metro's online archive of WWII-era downtown photos, at least we know what the building at 749 South Broadway used to look like, if only from a very skewed angle (it's the second lot up from 8th street in the linked photo under the "Tokyo Next" banner)......

This poor excuse for a building has no balconies, no overhangs, no awnings, no shrubs, no front windows, no shade, no hue, no nothing but a big square box of fugly......

Humorist and pop-culture historian Charles Phoenix is well known for his giant slide collection. He's been hoarding them for 17 years, searching through flea markets and thrift stores for the funniest and freakiest. On certain holidays he drags them out for an old-fashioned, living room–type slide show, but only Christmas......

The The Postmodern KFC at 340 N. Western Avenue in Koreatown. Get it? It's a chicken and a bucket!......

Try to pin down the original purpose of this building -- was it a Black Angus Steakhouse? Dancehall? Place of worship? All three simultaneously? 205 Imperial Highway in La Puente is the kind of building-as-sausage that occurs when a property is re-purposed over and over, added to, covered-up or slapped-on......