Architecture

THERE IS no state-of-the-art media room, no marble spa bathroom, nor some of the other luxuries one might expect at the home of "High School Musical" creator Bill Borden and modern architect Melinda Gray. Their Santa Monica house is a simple ranch, a 100-foot-long rectangle fronted by a loggia, its seven archways formed of fat bricks salvaged from an old kiln.

Museum of Arts and Design, New York Edward Durell Stone's 1964 Gallery of Modern Art on the southern edge of Columbus Circle in Manhattan -- a building then-New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable famously dissed as a "Venetian palazzo on lollipops" -- was controversial from the start. How will its replacement fare? This month, the official opening on the site of the Museum of Arts and Design will tell the tale. The museum was designed by Portland, Ore.

As construction workers laid steel posts from which a bright red building will rise at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, architect Cesar Pelli inspected the progress and talked about how buildings had changed since the great Blue Whale first went up in the 1970s. Even the new structure's color -- a blaring, fire-engine red -- would have been a shock in those days, when most buildings were modernist and spare.

In the spring of 1893, a financial panic hit Wall Street, sending the American economy skidding toward a depression. It also helped reshape the course of architectural history in Southern California, since cloudy career prospects in the Northeast helped persuade brothers Charles and Henry Greene, in the summer of that year, to leave Boston and head west to Pasadena.

For the last several years, conventional wisdom has been gathering behind the idea that the world's most innovative architectural projects would also, increasingly, be among the very biggest. Norman Foster in Moscow. Rem Koolhaas in Beijing. Frank Gehry on Grand Avenue and at the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.

Preservationists hoping to save the facade of a Richard Neutra-designed building at Hollywood's most famous corner have been told they are 70 years too late to stop demolition. Workers are removing the remains of the Basque nightclub, which was gutted about six months ago by a mysterious predawn fire at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

It's so hot that the heat doesn't hang, it shimmers. And though Edgar Arceneaux tends toward the pragmatic, even he has to stop and question whether he's staring at a mirage.

Tucked on a packed street in Manhattan Beach, the home of Shaya and Grant Kirkpatrick is based on a classic idea in Southern California Modernism: the coexistence of the open and the enclosed. Open, in this case, means window-filled walls and light-filled rooms, with few visible structural supports. Some walls stop short of the ceiling, making visitors wonder what's holding up the house. Stairs jut out, seemingly suspended by invisible forces. Even bathrooms feel open.

One afternoon in the middle of September, I stepped off a train onto the rain-slicked streets of this sleepy, well-kept town 25 miles northwest of Venice.

Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who designed the New York Times building and co-designed Paris' Pompidou Center, is set to build a new gateway to Valletta, the capital of Malta, and rebuild the city's opera house, which was bombed in 1942. The two projects will cost between $76 million and $101 million and take about four years to complete, Maltese Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said. The former opera house will be reconstructed to serve as the new parliament building. The projects are part of a plan for the regeneration of Valletta that also involves refurbishing the city's palaces and forts, Gonzi said.