University Of Southern California School Of Architecture

The former spiritual headquarters of Roman Catholicism in Los Angeles could be reborn as a hotel banquet hall, a music school, an ethnic museum, a senior housing complex, an international trade showroom, an office for federal immigration officials or an interfaith chapel. Those proposals for the future of the now-closed St. Vibiana's Cathedral were unveiled Thursday in a report and public exhibit by the Los Angeles Conservancy and USC's School of Architecture.

The former spiritual headquarters of Roman Catholicism in Los Angeles could be reborn as a hotel banquet hall, a music school, an ethnic museum, a senior housing complex, an international trade showroom, an office for federal immigration officials or an interfaith chapel. Those proposals for the future of the now-closed St. Vibiana's Cathedral were unveiled Thursday in a report and public exhibit by the Los Angeles Conservancy and USC's School of Architecture.

William L. Pereira's buildings and master plans are tribute enough for any architect. There is another phase of his professional life, however, that is less tangible but perhaps even more enduring. That is his role in shaping the careers of hundreds of future architects and planners. He was a fifth-year design critic at the University of Southern California's School of Architecture for many years, and his office served as a virtual postgraduate school for countless architectural school graduates, from USC and other schools, who served their apprenticeships under his tutelage on their way to acquiring their licenses and going on to other jobs, or starting their own practices.

It is about this time of year that parents start to picture their teenagers out of school, on endless summer vacation. If the image includes three months of beaches, malls and body piercing parlors, don't panic. Help is at hand: Here are 40 summer programs designed to keep young people challenged--from cleaning up National Parks to programming computers and learning to ace the SATs.

In 1919, a triumphant Frank Lloyd Wright completed Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. He returned to Chicago, expecting to be besieged with commissions and heralded as a world-class architect. Instead, he found no work. So Wright packed his bags and moved to Los Angeles, a town of movie sets, exotic buildings and rampant land development. He hoped for new inspiration, but there was no love at first sight. "All was flatulent or fraudulent with a cheap opulence," Wright grumbled in "An Autobiography."

From the car-choked intersection of Highland and Franklin avenues, it's hard to imagine a time when the streets leading up to Hollywood Heights were unpaved dirt roads, when neither smoggy air nor tall buildings blocked the panoramic view. That was 1920s Hollywood, when a walk down from neighboring Hollywood Heights led to a thriving Hollywood Boulevard where one could browse music and bookstores or shop for, say, a Chanel suit before dinner at Musso & Frank.