Wilshire Center

Talk about clever--what a coup to get prominent and up-and-coming architects to design California lifeguard towers. It’s fun, it’s smart and it’s likely to snag the attention of people who didn’t think they’d ever be poring over models and plans. Unlike the jerry-rigged foamcore variety, these models are impeccably turned out. The drawings encompass restless scribbles, pristine geometries and amusing commentaries.

Playfulness is the order of the day, beginning with Charles Moore’s habitable green-scaled fish that balances on 12 legs. It sports a tail poking up from the sand and a window-eye with an awning “lid.” Raimund Abraham does a “Beach Boys Throne,” a monster chair with a “seat” that serves as a lower deck, reached by a ramp. Michael Graves comes up with a striped circus tent motif plunked down on a big pink platform banded by wavy blue railing. Aldo Rossi’s tower spoofs a rocket ready for blast-off.

There are wittily ultra-sleek models like Morphosis’ wooden creation built of arcs, lines and triangles, and based on what looks like a neo-Constructivist drawing. Antoine Preddock’s “Landshark” is an elegant wedge of wire mesh that sits on skinny runners. Simon Ungers’ futuristic metal ship enclosure sprouts a slender rod poking through a hole-punched canopy.

Some designs stress practicality of a sort, like SITE’s modular set of stacked cubes, each of which can be filled with sand, a terrarium, a palm tree or a person. Stanley Tigerman’s no-nonsense solution houses a hypothetical wheelchair-bound lifeguard.

Whether all these creations are likely to pass muster with the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors is a valid question, but some of the architects seem not so much interested in solving a design problem as playing with a quintessential Southern California theme.

A giant megaphone pokes out of Donna Selene Seftel’s model, which sports a lazy numeral 2 sprawled over the roof. In addition to the hulking, tractor-like tower, Holt, Hinshaw, Pfau, Jones offers a photo-panel with a couple of lifeguards discussing surfing in woolly Deconstructivist terms. It’s a hoot. (Kirsten Kiser Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 31.)