Photos: Christopher Hawthorne’s best of architecture 2014

The feds chipped in and momentum flowed; in a twist unimaginable even three years ago, river backers are now on Gentrification Watch.  (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

The most important of the five Metro lines now under construction, it will not only add three new stations downtown, including one near the Broad Museum and Disney Concert Hall, but smooth out kinks in the existing system so that passengers can travel on a single train from Pasadena to Long Beach and from Santa Monica to East L.A.  (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

OK, so maybe its real price tag, as rumored, carries a B rather than an M, but Frank Gehry’s ship-like, glass-wrapped new museum for the French tycoon Bernard Arnault is among the best buildings from the second half of his career.  (Christophe Ena / Associated Press)

The Barbican’s exhibition on architectural photography was both rich historical survey and announcement of a contemporary sea change, as younger photographers break from the lucrative routine of shooting icons by celebrity architects.  (Chris Jackson / Getty Images)

Apologies for the glibness of that phrase, but it’s tough to look at the reinvention of the Line Hotel in Koreatown (once a Radisson) and the Ace Hotel downtown (originally the United Artists HQ), to mention just two, and not conclude that the Millennial Generation deserves credit for seeing something in L.A.’s old buildings their parents and grandparents did not.  (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)