Wendy Gilmartin
Everyone knows L.A. sits atop a vast reserve of petroleum sludge and stink (hence the La Brea Tar Pits, the methane vents, the ever-bobbing drills along La Cienega in Baldwin Hills, etc.), but would you ever suspect that's the reason for this sad, drooping, pastel-colored tower on the Beverly Hills/Century City border?
Wendy Gilmartin
The building that housed the LAPD's headquarters between 1955 and 2009 starred in TV shows like Dragnet in its heyday, but its slow, 50-year slide into disrepair gave it a real-world stigma that's left it tarnished and crumbling from the inside out -- most obviously because the community doesn't care to defend it.
Wendy Gilmartin
There's a Waylon Jennings song called "Too Dumb for New York, Too Ugly for L.A.," and that goes for these twin towers, dubbed Elleven and Luma (yes, that's how it's spelled), in downtown's quickly developing and gentrifying Southpark district too.
No doubt oodles of festive fun have been had within this faux fortification in the heart of the Valley. But Anoush's banal, mixed references to the gateways and stonework of historic Roman, Persian and Islamic architectural forms is confused at best, tacky at worst, and amounts to a cultural stereotype on par with Bravo's new reality TV series Shahs of Sunset. 
Wendy Gilmartin
Did you ever go to a SuperCuts and ask for the cheapest haircut? 816 Pacific Ave. in Venice is the building equivalent of that bad decision.
Wendy Gilmartin
Or maybe you've been the lucky recipient of one of those free do's from a local beauty school -- the kind that leaves you considering a wig? This apartment building is like that, too.
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Between Frank Gehry's house, the Bergamot Station complex and countless other condo developments, parking structures and strip malls around Santa Monica, the city could stand to implement a 10-year ban on corrugated metal-clad buildings.
Wendy Gilmartin
Wendy Gilmartin
Could it be they ordered the wrong number of stone tiles and then had to make up a pattern for the front of this Culver City gem?
Some smart contractor came up with this ingenious plan: Make it look intentional to leave the upper half of the crap-brown stucco exposed.
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Wendy Gilmartin
When asked why he preferred living and working in Los Angeles instead of other major cultural hubs like New York and Paris, artist John Baldessari once said, "I live here because L.A. is ugly... If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art? I always have to be slightly angry to do art and L.A. provides that."
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A.C. Martin Partners, Thomas Properties Group
Feast your eyes on the future. By 2015, the bustling, glowing corner of 7th & Figueroa downtown will have replaced the just-shuttered Wilshire Grand hotel with this concoction of stores, ads and vague glowing glass volumes.
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Wendy Gilmartin
The Days Inn at Santa Monica Blvd. and Stanford St. stands tall on its corner as a sickly pastel monument to long-tarnished Miami Vice dreams.
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