One reason I’ve long enjoyed both Salon and Slate is that they manage to to cover gooey issues like parenting in a sociocultural way that goes beyond “How” to ask “Why.” Of course, within three hours such articles generate about 900 comments from irate New Yorkers and other nameless malcontents, after which we find the discreet announcement ”The letters thread is now closed.” The latest hunk of red meat is the purposefully titled “Everybody Hates Mommy,” complete with the following teaser line:

“We’re ‘stroller Nazis.’ We’re whiny ‘breeders.’ Why is there so much contempt for mothers these days?”

Well, who can resist that?

Lynn Harris opens by linking to her own NYT article on how deeply everyone now hates Brooklyn’s Park Slope, hotbed of yuppie breeders that it has become. Because I lived in Park Slope in the late ’90s — when it was but a quiet redoubt for creative, nonwealthy single people — I’m willing to smirk at the snark, though I think these discussions would be more interesting if they widened their geographic scope. Harris soon touches on the all-important stroller question:

No consideration of Park Slope is complete without a discussion of stroller semiotics, of the stroller as synecdoche for the perceived evils of the neighborhood and indulgent urban child rearing in general. The high-end stroller — which is not confined to Park Slope — has become an epithet . . .  To their detractors, expensive strollers are in-your-face, in-your-way status symbols. They say, “I paid for this stroller, to say nothing of my three-story town house, which authorizes me to take up nine square feet.”

Well, she admits, everyone’s got a story about the annoying, insensitive turbo-mom. But:

I still say that when it comes to mother bashing, there’s more going on. Something deeper, more venomous, even more timeless. The level of vitriol is so high, its target so clear and consistent. “What’s very telling is that we are not cursing the husbands who are presumably working all these hours so that they can afford a really nice stroller,” notes former Washington Post columnist and Mommy Wars editor Leslie Morgan Steiner . . . . “We are cursing the mothers.”

After digressing pointlessly to Uma Thurman’s recent movie Motherhood (did it bomb because it was about mothers?), Harris explores reactions to other public faces of maternity, such as the trivialization of mom-bloggers and Facebook’s refusal to show breastfeeding photos.

Look, this double standard is real. As a group, dads don’t get bashed unless they walk out on the family altogether (and often not even then), in which case they’re not around to hear the bashing and by definition don’t care. But the real issue here is class, and the reason cranks focus on SUV strollers is that they are the most public face of baby-centered (over)consumption. I honestly don’t think people “hate” young mothers in this or any other culture; no one’s getting steamed about all those plastic Graco strollers crowding the aisles of Wal-Mart. What gets people steamed is the appearance of hard-edged entitlement and open pride in the very decision to have a child, as though education and income invested parenthood with a meaning it never had before. Due to one thing and another, many people today can tell how much a stroller cost by looking at it, and the top brands approach $1,000. Harris is unconvincing here:

The assumption that any stroller is a symbol of wealth is sort of ridiculous, given that a new Maclaren Volo can run you $95 — not cheap cheap, but hardly super-deluxe, and working out to about 7 cents a day — and half the ones you see around are hand-me-downs from other families anyway. But in New York, where wealth and status are defined by how many square feet you command…, the simple act of pushing a stroller down a gentrified street apparently seems to say “I own this block” in more ways than one.

This is absurd. Baby strollers in and of themselves do not tick people off. Harris ends weakly by saying that maybe moms with Hummer strollers are just trying to get the day’s errands done, and they might be in a better mood if they had “paid leave and affordable health and child care.” But even those mammoth issues are beside the point. When you buy an $800 stroller, you give up at least some of your right to be taken seriously when you demand affordable anything. And I, after years of gagging at the sight of strollers with all-weather tire treads, finally know what I’m talking about, because I’m faced with the painful and confusing truth that high-end baby wheels can be extremely hard to resist.

I’m glad the Times assigned these stories, as these important issues are far too little discussed in and around fertility clinics. Reporter Stephanie Saul explores the financial reasons for medical decisions that some would call reckless: insurance rarely covers IVF, so American couples can’t afford more than one or two cycles. To maximize their odds for pregnancy, they often gamble on overshooting the mark. Many commenters argue that if only insurance covered IVF, couples would feel freer to try the procedure with one embryo at a time, as many Europeans do. Unfortunately, experience does not bear this out; here in Massachusetts, state law mandates insurance coverage for at least one cycle of IVF, and we remain the twin capital of the nation. Too many other factors are in play.

What the Times articles don’t discuss are alternatives to the standard infertility protocols, apart from tinkering with the number of embryos used. IVF is seen as the top-of-the-line fertility treatment because it is more effective than any other, and patients pay accordingly — but the open secret is that IVF still isn’t very effective. For young women, the odds of success per IVF cycle tend not to exceed 50%; for older women, the odds are significantly lower. IVF is miraculous when it works, no question, but public faith in this somewhat overrated procedure is frustrating. Unless a couple’s fertility problem(s) is obvious, IVF doesn’t identify or treat the problem; it attempts to bypass it. When that doesn’t work, couples are left with no answers and no recourse  – except a doctor who will generally be happy to let them roll the dice again for $15,000 a whirl.

Successful low-tech alternatives get much less attention. Veteran fertility doctor Sami David, who performed New York’s first IVF thirty years ago, is one expert who now rejects the indiscriminate use of IVF in favor of finding and treating the root cause of a couple’s infertility. Promoting his new book on holistic fertility, Making Babies, he told the Times (UK) earlier this year, “I estimate that 50 percent of women on IVF don’t need it. They could get pregnant naturally. … A lot of doctors specialize in scaring the patient. They’ll tell a woman of 37 she’s left it too late and her only option is IVF. But they’re measuring everyone by the same yardstick. Every woman has time to take a three- or four-month evaluation of what’s going on with her body.” The power of medical custom is underlined by another fertilty doctor, Florida’s David Keefe, in Liza Mundy’s book Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Our World. “It’s a culture,” he says. “It truly is a culture. People think medicine is a science, but it’s a human civilization that has mores, practices, behavior, just like a primitive tribe. In medicine, our mores, practices, and behaviors are veiled in a cloak of professionalism.”

I don’t have much hope that holistic medicine will pierce the high-tech aura of ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology), but I have seen it work at close range. Medical protocols for infertility are far too rigid, and have grown deeply entrenched by preying on “older” women’s fears. In the Times stories, it’s depressing to see hundreds of haters carping in the Comments about the appalling selfishness of couples who want… a child. What’s appalling is this lack of compassion, but at the same time, these comments are driven by a legitimate sense that people who try too hard to defy nature might well get burned. Rather than blame the couples, who are only acting on advisement, I believe we need to question a medical culture that offers the same expensive, stressful, often ineffective procedures to everyone who walks through the door.

My affection for the magazine comes mainly from the cookbook it spawned a few years ago, a thumping wonderland of workable recipes and conversational lessons in culinary history. Back when I could boil only water, I heard Reichl interviewed about this book on NPR, and I remember her talking about the process of testing an old recipe for lettuce with melted butter — it sounded revolting, she said, but was startlingly delicious. (In the book she simply says, primly, “When all the elements come together in the right way, this salad is a revelation.”) My favorite recipe so far results in an appetizer called Baked Cheddar Olives — green olives baked in a cheddar-cheese dough — which I have turned into a signature dish because my guests tend to pop them like candy. Here, too, Reichl’s commentary makes the experience: “These standbys of old 1950s bridge club hostesses are worth resurrecting. They’re good — crisp on the outside with a briny surprise inside.” I love the italicized good, clearly a word even food editors never outgrow, but I downright cherish the image of 1950s bridge club hostesses.

I was pleased to read today that Reichl is prepping a new TV show in which she and a series of “celebrities” visit cooking schools around the world — as if she were not, in fact, a brand of her own, a sort of bookish Emeril. Why does the TV world seem to feel that anyone who works in print bears the unseemly stench of ink and physical dullness, and can’t possibly carry a show without someone more telegenic? I couldn’t agree more with the Village Voice that “celebrities” in cooking shows are at best superfluous and at worst downright insulting: as they point out, “Putting actors who seem to have no particular interest in food on food television was most recently done by that hideous show, Spain: On the Road Again.” I would have happily watched that series — anchored by my other kitchen hero, Mark Bittman — had not Gwyneth’s excruciatingly bored visage blocked the Iberian landscape. Ah, well… I have a vague hope that someone will, if not revive Gourmet, create something equally fine in its place. Corby Kummer could edit.

Just last year, LA Magazine heroically organized a reunion of Shulman, Koenig, Mr. and Mrs. Stahl, the two women who posed for the photo (the fiancée of Koenig’s draftsman and a friend of hers, along for the ride!), and a few others involved in setting this scene back in 1960. The resulting transcript of their conversation is pretty astonishing; it’s nice when the back story to such an historic event shows it to have been a happy affair. Of course, the photo was taken on deadline (for Arts and Architecture magazine) when the house was barely finished, so it’s fun to read tidbits like this one from Koenig: “You don’t see it in the picture—it all looks serene—but in the background all hell is breaking loose. People are running around, and junk and trash is piled up. If I had a proclivity for an ulcer, I’d certainly have had one.” No one quite knew, of course, that the photo would remain a professional high point for both Shulman and Koenig.

The spouse and I had the good fortune to see the Stahl House this spring — the family throws open its doors a few times each month — and it was easily, speaking of high points, one of the most memorable moments of our trip to SoCal. The Hollywood Hills are stunning in themselves, and the house, despite its simple plan, provides an incredibly complex experience because of the endless dimensions in the 270-degree view, the infinite sight lines from the living room alone. I probably shouldn’t put my own snapshot next to Shulman’s masterpiece, but I can’t resist sharing a bit of the love. Although Case Study House #22 is impishly dishonest in implying that the house is cantilevered, it achieves high art by showing how completely the Stahl House is “made” by its site.

In Shulman’s NYT obituary, if one clicks on the name of the writer, Andy Grundberg, one finds twenty years’ worth of writings on photography, including dozens of photographers’ obituaries. Just as I relish the fact that Shulman mastered the artistic niche of architectural photography, I’m impressed that Grundberg created his own lasting niche in photography journalism. This kind of specialization can sound odd at cocktail parties, but I think it usually results in the most gratifying work, and, in the case of Shulman, simply the best.

Despite lovingly constructed new models of lesser-known or unbuilt works, and some impressive computer animations, the show has a curiously two-dimensional quality. Dominated by plans and models, it relies on a visual language that many laypeople are unlikely to grok without getting somewhat distracted. I would have preferred more photographs for everyone’s sake, and more residential work. (The well-received exploding model of the Jacobs House turned out to be off in an annex that, annoyingly, we couldn’t find before closing time — big deduction for exhibit design.) I also found the giant model of Taliesin, with gradual site developments outlined by changing light projections from above, well-intended but confusing; annotation was sorely lacking there.

My favorite displays included the one that welcomed us as we began the spiral ascent to the exhibit: the 1956 stage curtain from the Hillside Theater at Taliesin, Wright’s Wisconsin home and intellectual nerve center. Made with pieces of colored felt sewn lightly onto coffee-tinted white cotton so that the colors flap loosely on two sides, the curtain is an abstraction of the Taliesin landscape, birds and all.  The sense of texture and movement at close range is just fabulous. The design has inspired decorative FLW swag; here it is at home in Wisconsin.

I also lingered over the model for the Unity Temple (1905, Oak Park), so breathtaking in its symmetry, manipulation of space, and materials. And the enormous color plans and models for the unbuilt Baghdad planning project were perhaps the biggest treat; the very drawings seemed to reflect Wright’s enthusiasm for this once-in-a-lifetime synthesis of ideas and geography. I especially loved his plans for outdoor market stalls (“Merchant Kiosks — Grand Bazaar”), so sensitive to the jostle and squeeze that characterize markets in that part of the world. The little spherical pods hold display space on the bottom and storage space above, so at the end of the day the merchant can put away the stock, lock the pod, and go home. It’s brilliant.

Plan at top, elevation at bottom

A final fascinating find was the Rogers Lacy Hotel, designed in 1946 for downtown Dallas. With its vertical atrium courtyard rimmed by guest rooms on open hallways, the design looks like every other atrium hotel built in the last half century. Never constructed, it nonetheless became a prototype.

It’s so fascinating to imagine one’s federal government mucking around in urban planning. Here in the U.S., broadly speaking, we no longer do urban planning, and many people live with the results. Paris, despite its timeless appearance, dates primarily from the mid-nineteenth century, when Baron Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine under Napoleon III, tore up the entire web of medieval warrens and mapped out grand boulevards that connected monuments and focal points in a manner befitting a capital. The bourgeoisie filled the resulting comely neighborhoods, with their famously uniform cornice lines, and the poor were sent on their way.

A century later, “the tabula rasa Modernist experiments of the 1960s and 1970s,” Ouroussoff writes — referring to the soul-killing process of razing working-class neighborhoods to make room for housing projects — “not only damaged cities across the world; their failure spelled the abandonment of visionary master planning.” In 1977, after a few such disasters, Paris banned high-rises from its central arrondissements, pushing them all to the outskirts, at which point “the Périphérique [ring road] became a dividing line, isolating the city of Haussmann from the growing modern sprawl in the banlieues that surrounded it.” Add several splays of railroad tracks and the adjoining industrial enclaves, and you have some badly forsaken neighborhoods in the very parts of Paris where most people actually live. The social consequences of this layout are well known. “On some level,” says Ouroussoff, “Sarkozy’s team of architects faces the same challenge Haussmann did 150 years ago: to give order to a vast, squalid, disordered metropolis that grew in fits and starts.”

Sarkozy’s brain trust, which includes Jean Nouvel and Richard Rogers, has put forth a variety of proposals, many involving increased greenery in the form of parks or rooftops. One architect, Djamel Klouche, proposes knocking the walls out of housing projects and replacing them with loftlike curtains of glass. Sarkozy has asked all ten architects to collaborate, which would seem to reduce the likelihood of success by a factor of, say, ten, but the energy behind the process is pretty remarkable.

As it happens, the Wall Street Journal‘s latest “Masterpiece” column featured the centennial of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan for Chicago, modeled in part on Haussmann’s Paris and rather more successful in connecting the city’s communities. The Boston Globe reports that Atlanta, home of America’s first housing project, plans to destroy its last remaining project by 2010, with public housing now offered in other forms. And New York’s High Line rail trail, while not on the same scale, looks like one of the most creative urban undertakings in recent history, a quirky, counterintuitive, altogether cool use of outdoor space that must have been a nightmare to arrange. The spirit does move here and there.

Crawford’s central argument is twofold. The trades have intrinsic value and pleasure for many of those who practice them; and Americans have made a mistake in gradually disdaining the trades in favor of office work, which is often more stultifying than liberating. Describing his own lung-clearing transition from desk jockey to entrepreneur, he carefully catalogs the ways in which fixing motorcycles can be intellectually stimulating, a canvas for the diagnostic arts and for tangible solutions. Likewise, he lays out the ways in which desk-bound work in an organization can be pointless and soul-killing, voicing some truths that many professionals prefer not to face.

His personal experiences are remarkable, beautifully chronicled, and altogether interesting, but I’m even more engaged by the philosophy behind them. As a white-collar professional in a modestly paid field, it’s long been clear to me that the average plumber, electrician, or handyman — particularly my own handyman, a person of prodigious gifts — makes more money than I do. Why, Crawford implicitly asks, do we feel compelled to steer every young person of functional intelligence to a lifetime of sitting at a desk?

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

I frankly had no idea that shop class had been pulled from high-school course menus. I took both wood and metal shop in junior high — against the objections of my mother, who argued, not without justification, that learning how to cook and sew in “home ec” class would be far more practical. It’s true that in the ensuing years I have not once found occasion to wield an oxy-acetylene torch; I learned to cook in a rather delayed manner; and I still can’t sew more than a button. But shop class was thrilling, an exposure to processes I knew I would never otherwise mess around with. And I made a cool chisel that my dad claimed to use once or twice.

Crawford tackles the critical issues of prestige and patronizing attitudes. It’s easy for suits to say that they respect the work of tradesmen, but I think the true test is how each of us, as individuals, would feel if one of our children expressed a desire to pursue a trade. “When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options,” Crawford writes. “We idealize them as the salt of the earth… But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it?”

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama reviews Shop Class As Soulcraft in tomorrow’s Times book review, calling it “a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America.” Fukuyama closes on an interesting personal note.

In the end I must confess that it would have been hard for me not to like this book. While I make my living as a “symbolic knowledge worker,” I have both ridden motorcycles and made furniture — my family’s kitchen table, the beds my children slept on while growing up, as well as reproductions of Federal-style antiques whose originals I could never afford to buy. Few things I’ve created have given me nearly as much pleasure as those tangible objects that were hard to fabricate and useful to other people. I put my power tools away a few years ago, and find now that I can’t even give them away, because people are too preoccupied with updating their iPhones. Shop class, it appears, is already a distant historical memory.

Crawford’s article, and the spirit that animates it, helped me to realize why I take growing pleasure in seemingly superficial pursuits like cooking and home improvement: not only are they intrinsically creative, but they produce palpable, visible, elemental results.

This 580,000-square-foot finished basement — three fourths the size of the Capitol itself—supersedes its principal functions as tourist-processing machine and exhibition hall in several unstated ways. It is also an embodiment of the profligate but ineffectual regime that commissioned it; a reductio ad absurdum of prevalent notions that historic sites require a panoply of “amenities” to entice, engage, entertain, enlighten, and enlarge its audience; and a manifestation of the “grow-or-die” corporate philosophy increasingly embraced by cultural, educational, and philanthropic institutions in thrall to their plutocratic backers.

All true, perhaps, but there was another motivation. Filler explains that the behemoth was occasioned by security concerns, not the 9/11 variety but “the shooting deaths of two Capitol policemen in 1998.”

Forget their being memorialized by stricter gun controls enacted by a Congress in the pocket of the NRA. The obvious solution to that tragedy was to dig deep and create an insanely expensive, oppressively scaled, marble-armored bunker to keep lawmakers and lobbyists out of firearm range.

Politics aside, this perspective seems painfully apt. Filler goes on to discuss the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia and the largely underground facility at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s former home in rural Virginia. I’m intrigued by the latter because I visited Mount Vernon for the first time last fall, and I remember the visitor center well — not because it marred the tranquility of the site, as Filler legitimately argues, but because it was so clearly aimed at keeping young boys awake. The windowless Disneylike sequence of five-sense displays, fish smells and all, were designed to show what life was like in Washington’s time; but they emitted such a cacophony of electronically amplified, cinema-level sounds that our main sensation by the end was an urge to emerge outdoors, where we really could see, at least visually and sonically, what life was like in Washington’s time. Noting that Mount Vernon is one of the loveliest, best-preserved landmarks in the country, Filler writes:

I’m…skeptical of marketers’ insistence that the survival of our cultural institutions demands extreme museological means to beguile a cyber-addicted populace. Earlier generations found ways to enjoy historic sites without the aid of touch screens, surround sound, interactive simulations, holograms, costumed reenactors, cappuccino, T-shirts…. If such gimmicks are now deemed obligatory, how did unmediated landmarks sustain America’s collective imagination — what Abraham Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory” — for so long?

I fear the critic succumbs to nostalgia here. I’m not sure it’s a safe assumption that “unmediated” monuments have until now “sustain[ed] America’s collective imagination.” Some children will always be bored by sites of this kind, not because they need bells and whistles but because they have little basis for understanding what it means to run a household as our forebears did. As for souvenirs, they’re the perfect way to raise funds for preservation, as they give people a tangible connection with the site for months or years afterward. But I couldn’t agree more that kids can and should be engaged in unobtrusive ways, if only so the moment isn’t ruined for adults.

Filler closes by warning us that an ungainly visitor center is planned for Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and I can chime in that a large center opened at Monticello shortly after our visit last year. (The Washington Post says it’s all about crowd control.) Hats off to Filler for spotlighting an architectural stream that too often escapes serious attention.

That’s why the emotion welled up so strongly during the [fifteen-minute] ovation: it was time for the reluctant maestro to receive the lionization that was his due. Salonen kept dragging out his collaborators, until rhythmic clapping from the audience required that he take a solo bow. When he walked out alone, the Philharmonic brass players saluted him with a fanfare, and the violinists and violists…returned to the stage, some of the women holding flowers. It is exceedingly rare to see orchestral musicians exhibiting feelings onstage, especially feelings for conductors; the code of the profession demands a poker face under almost all circumstances. Salonen’s farewell forced a breakdown of the code, to the point that out-of-towners felt as if they were intruding on a private affair.

Among Salonen’s achievements was “presiding over the opening of Walt Disney Hall” — which gives me an excuse to continue my California travel journal, if only to ensure that my memories don’t get lost in the smog of time. On a sunny day (is there any other kind?) in downtown L.A., we explored the Philharmonic’s new home, Walt Disney Concert Hall, via self-guided audio tour — recommended if you can’t see a concert, as you’re left to wander through and on top of Frank Gehry’s building at your leisure, exposed to everything but the auditorium itself.

I visited and liked Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 1998. I thought it worked perfectly in its (cloudy, gray) context, even if the interior was more interesting than comfortable. But Disney Hall felt like a maturation. The most interesting factoid on the audio tour was that Gehry experimented with umpteen materials for the cladding, avoiding anything in brushed silvertone lest he appear to be photocopying the Guggenheim. Nothing clicked. Finally (as I recall), the client urged him to remove that constraint, and he found stainless steel the perfect solution. The tone is cooler than that of the Guggenheim’s titanium, but most eyes won’t notice the difference.

What’s different in Disney is the warmth of the interior. Bilbao is all whiteness, metal, and stone; Disney dapples the white in womblike strands of Douglas fir. Pillars, beams, and giant light vases thrust and glide through the lobby and toward the upper floors.

At night, the light vases (above, bottom left; below, top right) illuminate the fir and create teasing bursts of light in the windows for the benefit of those outside. Walkways and corners are sculpted at myriad angles so that, as in Bilbao, every step opens up a new vista.

For additional texture, Gehry covered the normally tedious contributors’ wall (which, notably, showed that he and his wife were top donors) with strips of industrial, slate-gray felt. The letters of the names, set in a smooth, specially designed sans-serif font, were tacked into the felt one by one.

I loved the hall’s carpet, also designed by Gehry in an abstract floral pattern. It totally nailed the balance of classic Modernism and contemporary splash, and, of course, added color to the otherwise neutral interior — something the Guggenheim lacks. I wish we could have seen the auditorium, with its funky organ pipes (off to the right, below) and wonderful in-the-round layout:

Critic Martin Filler, in his review of the new book Conversations with Frank Gehry, highlights Disney’s relationship to the orchestra’s old digs next door, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In the 1990s, power broker Chandler “sniffed” that Gehry would “not be considered” to design a new hall. “Alas,” Filler writes:

Chandler didn’t live long enough to witness the triumphant opening of Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003. …Gehry’s pitch-perfect auditorium and the voluptuous forms that envelop it consigned Chandler’s prissy sub-classical bandbox and its notoriously dead acoustics to the dustbin of architectural (and musical) history. Disney Hall furthermore proved that Bilbao was no fluke…

Chandler Pavilion is still used for opera and dance, and I’m confident that its New Formalist design will stand the test of time. But the excitement around Disney Hall is unmistakable, and I hope it eventually helps to revive its distinctly blah neighborhood.

As we drove around downtown, I noticed the city’s slick packaging of classical musicians: even chamber players were shown up close and attractive on giant, unmissable billboards, challenging motorists to think for at least one moment about string quartets. The use of personality was blatant, but there’s no doubting its effectiveness. When the young Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel takes the baton this fall, L.A. will have a serious claim to be the hottest classical scene in the country.

As you drive on the freeway, looming up across the darkening horizon is a mountain range, which seems to be located in the middle of the city. For what was supposed to be a city, by definition a man-made environment, L.A. looks very natural.

I believe that’s what’s held my attention throughout our trip to SoCal and since: the seamless integration of humanity and nature, especially in L.A. itself.

Other surprises follow: the broad, inviting beaches, a sprawling coastal plain, verdant foothills, tortuous canyons, rugged mountains dropping precipitously into seemingly endless valleys, all within the city limits and all under a pervasive sun.

And that’s the thing: all those geological bonbons fall  ”within the city limits.” From a hilltop, the entire metropolis appears to have been sprinkled through the valleys like neatly cut feta cheese — there is no concrete jungle. Of course, the integration isn’t really seamless, or is too much so; Kaplan talks about the dangerous effects of hillside building on wildfires, for instance, and the topic of traffic is beyond my ability to address. But ultimately I’m glad I was late to the L.A. party, because I would not have appreciated all this had I seen it at a tenderer age.

There are some wonderful streetscapes, too, particularly in the Hollywood Hills, the upper reaches of Santa Barbara, and the older parts of Palm Springs, in all of which the Osterizer of architectural styles was plugged in for much of the twentieth century. “That’s very southern California,” said Robert Imber, Palm Springs’ architectural evangelist, in response to this observation. Design happened house by house, leaving Spanish Revivals cheek-by-jowl with Craftsman bungalows, mid-century moderns, English stone cottages, New England colonials, tiny, turreted castles, and ten other styles on every block. In most of the country this jumble would look awkward, even tacky. There, I swear, it was kind of fabulous.

The nineteenth-century Mission Santa Barbara is itself an amalgam, with a Greco-Roman facade (inspired by a neoclassical wave then sweeping Mexico), technicolor Chumash Indian painting on the walls of the nave,

and some deeply Spanish details, like this lantern and ceiling.

The 1929 Santa Barbara County Courthouse is even more of a hodgepodge, with Spanish Revival bones and Moorish, Castilian, Gothic, Baroque, and other Iberian flourishes. The interior is gorgeous, with murals by Cecil B. DeMille’s set designer and some resplendent Spanish ceiling and tile work. Even the signs for the various legal departments are painted Castilian-style; all that’s missing is the clink of cafe con leche cups and the smell of cigarette smoke. Having spent time in Spain, I recognized and admired most of the building’s details; the fact that they didn’t belong anywhere near one another seemed incidental. The courthouse is, like so much else in California, a fantastical creation that could only have occurred where it did.

I expected to fall in love with the Gamble House, the Greene brothers’ stunningly restored Arts and Crafts masterpiece in Pasadena. And I did love parts of it, particularly the stairwell — characteristically, the underside is fully finished –

– and the other showpieces of Burmese teak work in the public rooms (do click through if you’re unfamiliar with this house). Planning our trip around the Gamble’s once-a-month extended tour may have inadvertently diluted the effect, as the second floor is less spectacular than the first. The building is also unexpectedly dark inside. But the details were unforgettable; it’s no exaggeration to say that Charles and Henry Greene designed every inch of that house and its furniture, giving each room a different theme in either wood (they used twelve species) or motif. Much of the structure is exposed — “The idea was to build decoration, not decorate buildings,” said our guide — but every beam is veneered with the same type of wood used to decorate that room. I particularly enjoyed the rose motif on the dining room’s stained-glass windows, designed to echo the rosebush on the other side of that wall; and the decorative woodwork on the wall surrounding the sink pipes in the guest bedroom (no joke). The Greenes’ early achievement in integrating the indoors and outdoors was clear, and was expressed almost metaphorically by the fusion of Japanese elements with the shingled Arts and Crafts framework: again, a melange.

It was pure accident that we toured the Gamble House and the uber-modern Stahl House on the same day — and pure genius. Next up, the Moderns…