I first purchased my now well-worn copy of David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s Architecture in Los Angeles: A Complete Guide some three years ago. For just six dollars, I walked away from downtown LA’s The Last Bookstore with the 1985 edition of a book that quickly became one of the most instrumental in my life, shaping the focus of my doctoral dissertation. No other book has had such an influence on the way I see our city or understand architecture itself.

For the uninitiated, Architecture in Los Angeles is a compendium of some of the most architecturally significant buildings in LA and its surround. The book transforms Los Angeles from a maze of freeways, strip malls and private homes into a public museum that reveals seemingly quotidian buildings as great works of art, worthy of contemplation and aesthetic appreciation. The book demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that Los Angeles is one of the most architecturally significant cities in the United States, if not the world.

Through Gebhard and Winter’s lens, for example, John C. Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel (1976) evolves from a mere oddity into an intentional and worthy object of interrogation. Upon reading its entry in the guidebook, you learn that the architect built the hotel to be best appreciated from the freeway, perhaps the ultimate totem in our car-focused city. Both Gebhard and Winter emphasize Los Angeles’ unique architectural history. They reject any attempt to provincialize the city by showing you how to see the city anew, as an unprecedented feat of 20th-century architecture and engineering. For instance, you don’t find buildings built to be appreciated from your own private vehicle in London or New York.

Architecture in Los Angeles: A Complete Guide cover, 1985.

Originally written for scholars traveling to the city for the annual meeting of The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in 1964, Architecture in Los Angeles sought to introduce these academic visitors—most of whom hailed from the East Coast—to Los Angeles, the jewel of the West. In the original edition, Gebhard and Winter decided to emphasize the modernist tradition developed in Los Angeles by such well-known architects as Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Raphael Soriano and Gregory Ain, along with countless entries dedicated to Beaux Arts and Queen Anne-styled buildings. While the book was not completed in time for the SAH meeting, upon its publication in 1965 it quickly became the central resource for preservationists, historians and lay enthusiasts who desired to see Los Angeles for the first time.

After returning to Los Angeles after 12 years away, I found myself in the midst of the pandemic. Although I had moved to the city to conduct archival research, this was now impossible. Desperate to get out of the house, I reached for my trusted architecture guide. After visiting many of the sites from the 1985 edition only to learn that they were destroyed, I decided to purchase the most recent, 2018 edition of Architecture in Los Angeles, which was revised by Winter and his student Bob Inman (Gebhard passed away in 1996). The new edition features larger, more intuitive entries and updated maps. And as always, Winter, Gebhard and now Inman served as trusted guides, reorienting my understanding of a city undergoing profound transformations in the wake of the coronavirus. With their aid, I’m able to see past the muddle of highways that spread indeterminately throughout a Southland strewn with homeless encampments and million-dollar homes. The book allowed me to see that Los Angeles, at its core, is an amalgamation of experiments that tried, and often failed, to reshape—architecturally—what it means to be an American.