Frederick Fisher

Courtyards were history's earliest garden rooms. Egyptians built them, Greeks paved them with stone, Romans set them off with colonnades, and for the same reasons the Persians loved them, so do we. Cooled by a fountain, they're a blessing in a hot climate. Their walls shut out the street, the neighbor's dogs, the howl of the Santa Anas. They give us frontyards we can use and invite us to enjoy them--for reading, lolling, feeling cosseted and soothed.

SO BARE IS THE dining room of the house Michael Folonis designed for his family in Ocean Park, a mail carrier walked through the front door thinking that he was in an apartment lobby. But when people call the Spartan room high-tech, the architect laughs. "This is no-tech--as dumb a system of construction as building a garden wall." In fact, it's a brilliant match of art and practical constraints, pretending to be simpler than it is.

Gere Fennelly, a composer and former keyboardist for the rock band Redd Kross, was in bed for the night, nearly asleep, when she heard Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon." Every note was perfect, like the record she listened to as a teenager. A dream? No. That's life in Hollywood Dell. Beginnings The night of the Hollywood Bowl's first concert, July 11, 1922, the Los Angeles Phil- harmonic Orchestra opened its still-running Symphonies Under the Stars summer concert series.

In the film industry, where much is not as it seems, we were reassured to find that film image is backed by reality--Franco Nero still has blue eyes. He was flashing them Saturday evening at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the L.A. Italian Film Festival gave him a lifetime achievement award for a career that has spanned 130 leading roles, mostly in Europe. No. 131 is a cynical lawyer in "Uninvited," an independent film that just wrapped on Long Island.

During the last two weekends, more than 60 new exhibitions have opened in commercial galleries across Los Angeles, from Venice to Chinatown. The fall art season is definitely underway. Anchoring the season will be the last of the nation's big millennial exhibitions, as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art devotes galleries in three buildings to "Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000" (Oct. 22-Feb. 25).

Most architects use their offices as a showcase for their talent, often transforming their work spaces into three-dimensional samplers of their design skills. An exception to the rule is Frederick Fisher, a West Los Angeles architect who has chosen instead to preserve a more than 40-year-old building designed and built by another architect, the late A. Quincy Jones.

As an appreciative reader of Nicolai Ouroussoff and as chair of Otis College of Art and Design's School of Fine Arts, I read his Nov. 15 piece "Big Hopes at Otis College Get Boxed In" with a mix of sadness and dismay about his judgment regarding the interiors of the new fine-arts building under construction on campus. When Ouroussoff peers inside, all he sees is "a warren of tightly packed rooms."

By choosing the paintings of Christopher Le Brun for the inaugural exhibition of its spare and beautifully articulated new gallery, designed by architect Frederick Fisher, Pasadena's Art Center College of Design has delivered an unusual message. Le Brun is an old-fashioned painter whose canvases are highly Romantic in bearing. Indeed, these are pictures in many ways more attuned to the intoxications of the 19th Century--think of his countryman, J.M.W.

Regarding the Oct. 27 article about Rep. Jay C. Kim: It is sad to see a new member of Congress, who campaigned to change things in Washington, fall into the same rut of blaming everyone but himself for his campaign misdeeds. What a mess our country would be in if everyone used the excuse, "I didn't know the rules." I am amazed that a multimillionaire Republican politician would allow his mother to live in government-subsidized housing. But then his mother is quoted, "My son always thought of me."

So what if the name, for all its alliterative bounce, seems not quite right? And who cares, really, if the quality has ebbed ever so slightly in the last few days? The website Unhappy Hipsters ( www.unhappyhipsters.com) is the most welcome addition to the often self-serious world of architecture and design in recent memory, not to mention a pocket of satirical warmth in the middle of a soggy, recessionary, earthquake-wracked, Martha Coakley winter. Produced anonymously on a simple Tumblr blogging platform, it adds brief, deadpan captions to photographs from Dwell magazine (and a few other publications)