Architecture: The best of 2009

The importance of a great standalone building should never be underestimated. But in Los Angeles, as in other still-developing or densifying cities, other kinds of design excellence are arguably more meaningful to the life and future of the metropolis. This list, then, includes a handful of terrific buildings, yes, but also an elevated park, a couple of books, a movie, a transit line, a new pedestrian zone and a pair of museum installations by emerging architects.

“Small Case Study House,” a January installation at REDCAT. The talented and influential young Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow, after carefully studying the landmark postwar Case Study program, designed three structures for REDCAT’s main gallery. Made of salvaged wood, and open to the air, they hovered poetically between art and architecture, and between hardened and sweetly optimistic.

Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, New York, February, and the Wyly Theatre, Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, REX/OMA, Dallas, November. A joint honor: If neither one was transcendent as architecture, together they helped breathe new life into the design of spaces for the performing arts, Alice Tully with warmhearted invention, the Wyly with cool, rather standoffish smarts. Both stuck with me long after I’d decided they were ready to be forgotten.

Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica, April. Philanthropist Wallis Annenberg and architect Fred Fisher teamed up to create a fantastic new public amenity, including pool, beach access and community meeting rooms, on a site where William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies and friends once held lavish private bashes. Score one for shared space and the Los Angeles of the future.

The Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, with a visitors center by Safdie Rabines Architects, April. Parks of this size, and offering these kinds of views, are a rarity in even the most open-space-friendly cities in the country, let alone in a place as starved for new green space in Los Angeles. From the top you can see the whole L.A. panorama, from oil rigs to mountains to boulevards to unlovely buildings to ocean.

New pedestrian-only space on Broadway (and elsewhere), New York City, May. If NYC’s forward-thinking transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, can remove lanes for car traffic to create new space for bikes and pedestrians on Broadway in Manhattan, remind me why we can’t do the same in Los Angeles? Anyone?

The High Line, New York City, June. Landscape firm Field Operations and architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro transformed a stretch of abandoned railway into one of the most compelling pieces of landscape urbanism seen anywhere in the last decade. A triumph at the level of infrastructure and for its marvelous details.

“Feathered Edge,” an installation by Ball-Nogues Studio, July. Curated by Brooke Hodge. Inside the Pacific Design Center branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art -- not exactly an easy space to work with -- one of L.A.’s most talented emerging architecture firms used little more than colored string to create an installation of intelligence, keen craft and unapologetic beauty. A kind of diaphanous temple celebrating the arrival of a post-Gehry, post-Mayne school of Los Angeles architecture.

“(500) Days of Summer,” July. The film, directed by Marc Webb, may well have offered, as Nathan Lee argued on NPR’s Website, a dose of Nora Ephron for the hipster set. But it was significant for marking on celluloid a new generation’s discovery of downtown Los Angeles and its vintage architecture. Carefully edited to excise shots of Walt Disney Concert Hall or Thom Mayne’s Caltrans District 7 Headquarters -- or any other new or newish buildings, for that matter -- the movie arranged its architecture to match, precisely, the anachronistic tastes of its characters.

“Hearts of the City,” by Herbert Muschamp (Knopf), November. “Building Up and Tearing Down,” by Paul Goldberger (Monacelli), October. Collected reviews by Muschamp, the late New York Times architecture critic, and Goldberger -- who preceded him at the Times and is now at the New Yorker -- appeared in bookstores within a few weeks of each other. That bit of publishing serendipity gave architecture fans a chance to compare the very different styles -- Muschamp, mercurial and piquant; Goldberger, more tempered and, at his best, more elegant -- of these critics, among the most prominent chroniclers of architecture’s recent boom years.

Metro’s new Gold Line and its stations, November. If none of the stations themselves are world-beating as pieces of architecture, the November extension of the Gold Line through Little Tokyo and into East Los Angeles was a reminder of how profoundly new transit is remaking the physical and psychological terrain of the city.