Architects

BEFORE construction had wrapped on Vanessa Choy and Andrew Wong's house in Studio City, the rumors had started swirling. The couple were building a halfway house for addicts, passersby speculated. The home was some sort of mean joke on the neighborhood, others feared. One woman screamed from the middle of the street: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" The consternation didn't seem rooted in the size or scale of the house, but by its style.

When Mark Rios takes the microphone Tuesday evening at a public hearing inside Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he'll be presenting two very different designs for the new civic park downtown. The first is what his Los Angeles firm, Rios Clementi Hale Studios, calls a "base" plan, for which the projected $56-million cost is already in hand -- paid by Related Cos. as part of its deal to develop a commercial project with Frank Gehry across Grand Avenue from Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The gig: Stadium architect Dan Meis, the lead designer of the Staples Center, is working with billionaire developer Ed Roski to draft a proposal for an NFL arena in Los Angeles. Meis, now managing director of the Los Angeles office of international architectural firm Aedas, has had a successful career designing sports complexes, including Seattle's Safeco Field and Cincinnati's Paul Brown Stadium.

As he entered the Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., Thom Mayne sharpened his attack plan in his mind. The bad boy of American architecture was about to meet his new nemesis for the first time, and he wanted to set the tone early. His opponent that day in 2001 was U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, a conservative jurist who stood for everything Mayne scorned.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York and P.S.1 Contemporary Art have named the Echo Park design firm of Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues winner of its annual Young Architects Program to design an installation for the courtyard of P.S.1. Titled "Liquid Sky," Ball and Nogues' sculptural canopy will be on view in the P.S.1 courtyard in Long Island City, Queens, beginning June 21, the museums announced Friday.

Architect Brenda Levin, a Los Angeles-based specialist in historic preservation and adaptive re-use of cultural facilities who recently transformed Griffith Observatory, has been selected as the design architect for the expansion and modernization of the Autry National Center in Griffith Park. The project will accommodate the vast collection of Native American artifacts compiled by the Southwest Museum, which merged with the Autry in 2003.

Motorcycles and sailboats helped Frank Gehry finally get a building here. The cycles came into play when veteran chief executive Barry Diller, now head of IAC/InterActiveCorp, joined an outing of the celebrity Guggenheim Motorcycle Club in Bilbao, Spain, the home, of course, to one of Gehry's best-known structures, the Guggenheim Museum.

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne and his Santa Monica firm Morphosis are on the short list of candidates to design a 120,000-square-foot center for education and art for the Barnes Foundation, the organization announced Friday. The other five candidates are Tadao Ando of Japan; Diller Scofido + Renfro, New York; Kengo Kuma, Japan; Rafael Moneo, Spain; and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, New York.

WOOD-BLOCK models, drawings and notes for 200 Modern buildings and projects completed over half a century have taken over four rooms of Ray Kappe's Pacific Palisades house. But in a few weeks, moving vans will transport the architect's life's work a few miles away to its permanent new home: the antiquities-rich Getty Center.

George Yu, who died last weekend at age 43 of a rare form of lung cancer that afflicts nonsmokers, was a refreshing anomaly among Los Angeles architects. In a field of relentless self-promoters, Yu was quietly but forcefully candid, even about the limitations of his own work. He was fully versed in computer-aided design but careful -- even eager -- to test the limits of the digital technology against physics and the demands of clients.