Less dense yet equally diverse, Los Angeles sets itself apart from East Coast cities as individualistic and ambitious, expressing itself through a unique, ever-changing design vocabulary. The legacy of California Modernism is still going strong in the City of Angels. Of course LA also follows many 21st-century undercurrents: sustainability, digital design techniques, abstracting patterns und structure from the natural world. Similarly, the dramatic landscape of southern California call for dramatic architectural gestures, its natural surroundings - the desert, the foothills, and the Pacific Ocean - remaining major inspirations for designers. The contextual emphasis on color, texture, and materiality are revealed in each of the groundbreaking architectural works in this book.