Wendy Gilmartin

There’s something uncanny and deceptive about the Van Nuys Government Center. Indeed, the complex seems to deceive even itself: Government Center is only one of its three designations, along with The Van Nuys Civic Center and The San Fernando Valley Administrative Center. The program is just as variable: Ten local, state, and federal government office buildings flank an open-air plaza, within which lie garden areas, monuments, and memorials.

When Tony Wells and Brittany Stevenson bought the apartment at 20 Westminster Ave. in Venice ten years ago, the place was a heroin den with a slumlord owner who never fixed things. The front was covered with decaying wood shingles, grimy linoleum hid the historic tile work in the foyer and low dropped ceilings made the rooms inside feel dark and claustrophobic. "We completely gutted the place, tore off all the finishes and started over again," Brittany says.

The The Postmodern KFC at 340 N. Western Avenue in Koreatown. Get it? It's a chicken and a bucket! Conceived at the tail end of the radical eighties by architect Jeffrey Daniels and completed in 1990, this KFC franchise epitomizes the blocky, colorful, asymmetrical, and never subtle building-as-symbol style that typified postmodernist architecture twenty years ago.