STYLE: ARCHITECTURE : HOME, SURREAL HOME : Our Critic-Behind-the-Wheel Celebrates a Few of L.A.’s Most Eccentric--and Amusing--Architectural Gems

When Charles Jencks first aimed his witty architectural criticism at Los Angeles homes in his 1978 book, “Daydream Houses of Los Angeles,” reactions were wildly mixed:

Scholars like historian-critic Reyner Banham applauded him for recognizing Angelenos’ lively diversity. Actor Steve Martin called to say he wanted to borrow the colorful architectural descriptions for one of his movies. (“L.A. Story” was less about local architecture than the eccentric people who inspired it, but that’s another story.) And the homeowners whose residences were pictured wrote stinging letters, declaring “How dare you!”

The indignant Angelenos missed the point, of course, which was that the houses on Jencks’ hit list were meant to be enjoyed--quirks and all--as forms of amusing self-expression.

“There was no intent to malign,” assures Jencks, a British writer/architect and visiting professor of architecture at UCLA, who was among the first in his field to champion postmodernism. He only wanted to celebrate the places that, as he wrote 17 years ago, “make you turn your head away from the traffic, look and, however reluctantly, smile.”

Author of last year’s “Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots and the Strange Beauty of Hetero-Architecture,” in which he held up eclectic Los Angeles as the global city of the future, Jencks has just completed “The Architecture of the Jumping Universe,” a broader look at the interplay between architecture, culture and science, to be published by Academy Editions this month. But it is to his hometown away from home that he returns again and again.

“Los Angeles is the last great place in the world where self-expression is allowed,” he explains. “There’s a freedom from restraint that allows not only Mt. Olympus but also allows good architects to do whatever they wish. Without this, the city would dry up and become architecturally boring.”

Ever the provocateur , Jencks the drive-by critic has been at it again, this time at The Times’ request. Updating his commentary on residential architecture, he fixed his sardonic sights on houses built in the last 10 years, plus a few older ones recently discovered. Here, the latest hits and misses.