Zaha Hadid

"THAT'S why the cult of the starchitect is so reprehensible," Bruce Wagner was saying as he sat in the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge. He was ranting about the narcissism that motivates high-profile architectural competitions, and the ridiculousness of over-designed memorials to the dead. "The cathedrals were built anonymously. Now anonymity is a horror," he continued. "To me the most beautiful memorial for 9/11 are just the two lights.

The architectural design that Eli Broad is scheduled to reveal Thursday in a news conference at Walt Disney Concert Hall wraps the museum housing his contemporary art collection in a porous honeycomb. The billionaire collector and philanthropist hopes the $130-million building will help bring about his vision of downtown L.A. as a bustling urban hive of culture and street life. The three-story museum will be known simply as the Broad, although the Broad Art Foundation is its formal name.

It's time for one of architecture's rites of spring: reading the Pritzker Prize tea leaves. So what can we glean from the news that 58-year-old Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, barely known outside the profession, was on Monday named the winner of this year's Pritzker, the field's top honor? Taken on its own, the award seems most clearly to honor Souto de Moura's unwavering commitment over the course of his career to a tough, muscular brand of Minimalist architecture.

Is a strain of recent abstract painting obsessed with revitalizing the celebrated tradition of the 1950s New York School? A peculiar new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art says yes, proposing that a vigorous revival of Jackson Pollock's drips, Mark Rothko's luminous clouds of color, Franz Kline's muscularity of forms and other painterly concerns from a half-century ago is underway - albeit with a notable twist. The old abstraction recorded the singular hand of the artist at work in the studio.

ART Another Glass Ceiling Crumbles: British architect Zaha Hadid will become the first woman to design a major U.S. art museum, having been chosen this week to create the new $25-million home for Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center. Hadid was selected from among 97 competing architects in a global search, the museum's board of directors said.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has launched a planning process that could transform its sprawling campus on Wilshire Boulevard into a more unified complex with a grand entrance and a distinctive architectural presence.

The article "A Failure of Vision" by Nicolai Ouroussoff (June 3) misses the larger implications of why there is such an ambivalent climate around architectural competitions in this country. And while he laments that the government-sponsored competition for a $300-million federal courthouse here did not produce a visionary design worthy of such a competition, he misses the bigger picture.

So many themes, so late at night. The Architecture Foundation of Orange County and Bowers Museum threw a party Saturday night that drew more than 200 guests for cocktails, dancing, ogling and a midnight breakfast buffet. Most of the ogling was directed at the Santa Ana museum itself, decked for the night with more cultural references than a history primer. The first sight for those attending "Le Bal Masque Des Arts" was an antique carriage with a massive pumpkin in the driver's seat.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA is the car world's crystal ball: Home to the most advanced car-design studios in the country, it's the place all the big carmakers look when they want to see the future. And, indeed, the entries in the second annual Los Angeles Auto Show Design Challenge are plenty futuristic-looking. The competition gives 10 studios the chance to pursue far-flung ideas without worrying about budgets or narrow focus-group preferences.