These were the words of the year in architecture: Basic. Fundamental. Primitive. Ancient.

If fashion had normcore — the flaunting of a bland, practical and Gap-like aesthetic, the plain sweatshirt as statement of principles — architecture reset itself this year in an even more fascinating (if occasionally desperate) way.

In a culture and an economy being dizzyingly remade by technology, architecture chose to embrace not the future, where architects [...] can seem superfluous, but the past. — latimes.com

When Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks at L.A., he sees the city shaped by immigrants. Landmark buildings in Koreatown that adapt and evolve with a new generation. Houses in Arcadia that allow Chinese homeowners a proud, conspicuous place in a new country. Street life across the region that takes its cue from the way Latino neighborhoods blur the line between public and private. — latimes.com

It is a fractal of contemporary Los Angeles architecture, the fragment that both contains and helps explain the whole. [...]

What gives the $165-million project its unusual symbolic power is that it takes the generic stuff of a typical L.A. apartment building — a wood frame slathered in white stucco and lifted above a concrete parking deck — and expands it dramatically to urban scale. [...]

The design takes banality and stretches it like taffy in the direction of monumentality. — latimes.com

A few minutes after sitting down to talk with Renzo Piano in his large, airy Paris studio Tuesday, I asked the architect about the progress of the film museum he is designing for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Wilshire Boulevard.

"The academy?" he asked. "Ha. The academy is a good story.

"Look, I know you don't like that scheme," referring to my recent coverage of the design.

"I don't think it will be that bad. Actually, I'm struggling to do something good." — latimes.com

"We're working with the other owners of the property and with Metro," said LACMA Director Michael Govan. "There's good reason to build a major development there. You've got subway access and density on Wilshire. My dream is some beautiful piece of architecture with an architecture and design museum at the base, which would add to Museum Row."

If built, the tower would offer a dramatic vertical complement to the relentlessly horizontal LACMA gallery building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor — latimes.com

"I think that the press has been too fast to reduce the conversation to heroes and villains and martyrs, and to suggest that what MoMA is doing is necessarily bad. We want to get more information out. We want to share the problem with others and invite them to really take a hard look" - Elizabeth Diller — LA Times

Now that the exhibition has opened at the museum's Geffen Contemporary branch in Little Tokyo, where it will limp along through the middle of September as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series, it's clear that it is the product of an architectural ruling class in Los Angeles that is not so much dysfunctional as increasingly insular. — Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an acclaimed Swiss architect is hoping to pull off what an acclaimed Dutch one could not.

Next month LACMA will publicly unveil a $650-million plan by Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor for a dramatic new museum building along Wilshire Boulevard. — latimes.com

Stern's architecture is always steeped in strategic references to past landmarks; there is no doubt he knows how to send, and shape, an architectural message. And the message the front entrance to the Bush Library delivers is clear: This is a building meant to honor a particularly blunt and plain-spoken kind of political power. — latimes.com

It is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration. Mayne's design appears to put innovative architecture on a literal pedestal — or a plinth, to be exact — while actually allowing it to become peripheral, noticeably separate from the heart of the museum and its galleries. — latimes.com