Architecture

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.

Belgium on Thursday celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Atomium, an oddity of modern architecture touted as the "most astonishing building in the world." Built for the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, the Atomium is a towering structure made up of nine giant aluminum-clad spheres linked with steel tubes. The sci-fi design represents an iron atom magnified 165 billion times. Originally planned as a temporary attraction, it became one of the best-known landmarks of the Belgian capital.

It was the 1950s. America was a superpower, and the Los Angeles area was the center of it. The space race was on. A car culture was emerging. So were millions of postwar babies. Businesses needed ways to get families out of their automobiles and into coffee shops, bowling alleys, gas stations and motels. They needed bright signs and designs showing that the future was now. They needed color and new ideas. They needed Googie.

Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who designed the New York Times tower on 8th Avenue at 40th Street in Manhattan, made a point of keeping the building transparent at ground level. His goal, he said before the building opened last summer, was to avoid the forbidding, fortress-like appearance that marks other post-9/11 towers in Manhattan. He wanted the final product to look inviting. He may have succeeded too well.

Those who have never seen Riverside may picture it in the language of L.A. drive-time radio: Triple-digit heat. Foreclosures. Traffic. But unlike some cities on the coast, its 312,000 residents started long ago to transform their downtown rather than dismantle it. Downtown's Mission Inn Avenue speaks to their powers of imagination. The gracious former YWCA, designed by Hearst Castle architect Julia Morgan, is now the Riverside Art Museum.

Walk into Anthony Pearson and Ramona Trent's Mar Vista home and it's difficult to tell that the dynamic space, rippling into the outdoors from a deceptively low entryway, began its life as a simple postwar California bungalow. By the time its latest owners encountered it, the house, not far from the Santa Monica airport, had already been renovated several times. "An L-shaped floor plan had turned into something approaching a zigzag," Pearson laments.

For much of the 20th century, Los Angeles was one of the few major cities in the United States--maybe the only one--that offered so much promise to new arrivals when it came to residential architecture. In New York and other large cities on the East Coast, showing up as a new resident without a trust fund has always meant scratching out a living and moving slowly up the housing totem pole, from undersized apartment to slightly-less-undersized apartment.

FEW GRASPED how John Lautner used architecture to embrace the natural world. He opened a Sunset Boulevard diner to the sky and was dismayed to see it become a symbol of "Googie" Atomic Age design. His flying saucer-shaped Chemosphere residence, conceived to immerse residents in sweeping mountain and city views, became emblematic of the bachelor-pad Hollywood Modernism he rejected. Movies sensationalized his creations as James Bond-style backdrops for sex machines and lethally bored rich kids.

FIVE DECADES AGO a young architect made his pitch to Norman Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times: Build a suburban house that embodied forward-thinking design. Make it affordable for a middle-class family. Then document the process in the newspaper, from planning to construction to the completed home. Chandler jumped at the idea, and the Times Home Magazine House was born. On Jan. 5, 1958, a nine-page spread detailed the architecture by Edward H. Fickett, with interiors by Arthur Elrod.

Though it won't be finished for another year or so, the China Central Television headquarters, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren of the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is already a jaw-dropping sight. A giant Mobius strip of a skyscraper, CCTV consists of two leaning towers, each 51 stories high, connected by a pair of cantilevered arms.