In its own way, Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles is as strange and fantastical as the imaginary towns in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. One of the Italian novelist's inventions is Armilla, a city that consists of nothing but a forest of water pipes, where beautiful women shower. Another is Morlana, which has a gorgeous fa�ade of alabaster gates and coral columns, which hides a pile of trash. Yet another city is a sphere made up of twisted roads designed to prevent a woman from escaping....

FRUITVALE: THE DIFFICULT BIRTH OF THE TRANSIT VILLAGE One of the ongoing issues of modern architecture � and one of the story lines that keeps modern architecture interesting after so many false starts and blind alleys � has been the struggle to arrive at a consensus on what exactly is the "right" form for new types of buildings. Imagine the situation of architect and urban planner a century ago. They had never dreamed of a gas station, a drive-in restaurant or a multiplex theater. Here is Henry v...

Restraint is rarely touted as a virtue in urban design. Often, instructors in the History of Urban Design tend to treat the subject as a series of Greatest Hits - of grand interventions by such magnificently meddlesome people as Andre LeNotre or Baron Haussman or Robert Moses. Teachers in graduate seminars rarely show slides of, say, a Midwestern town and exclaim, "Look at how well the urban designers held themselves back!" The blockbuster mentality makes the current master plan of Mission Ba...