Part of the three-stage master plan for the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters (2009), spearheaded by an AECOM/Roth + Sheppard joint venture in the city’s redeveloping Downtown, the Main Street Parking + Motor Transport Division is the kind of ancillary project that could sever a neighborhood by virtue of its sheer mass and typically unattractive aesthetic.

A four-level, 27,000-square-foot performance hall with an auditorium on the two main floors, office space on a small third floor, a lounge and parking below plaza level, and three additional floors of subterranean parking.

Charged with adding expansive and flexible exhibition space to the museum's campus, the Renzo Piano team—who were responsible for the neighboring Broad Contemporary Art Museum, completed in 2008—designed an open-plan pavilion large enough to accommodate large-scale works or several separate exhibitions simultaneously.

In his own 1952 home, Cliff May — father of the California ranch-house movement — designed an open-plan space divisible by movable walls and cabinets.

Talking to 27-year-old architect Jayna Cooper about the house she designed and built for herself on busy La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, you’d think it all came about through luck and happenstance. But, as someone smart once said, luck is no accident.

Using a process of renovation through subtraction, the New York—based firm Lynch / Eisinger / Design (L/E/D) created a multitenant commercial building in part by taking away pieces of an old industrial complex.

The new, 1.2 million square-foot, eight-story Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, incorporating the Mattel Children's Hospital and the Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, is a state-of-the-art facility with a humanizing and uplifting environment.