LAND SPECULATION FOR residential development has played a uniquely central role in Los Angeles' history; and residential buildings, appropriately enough, have long been considered the city's greatest contribution to architecture.

The first landmark in this tradition is the Gamble House in Pasadena (1908), a masterpiece of the American Arts and Crafts movement. "Arts and Crafts" refers generally to the aesthetic movement begun by Ruskin and William Morris in England; American expressions of this aesthetic include Gustave Stickley's furniture, and the "Mission" architectural style exemplified by Greene and Greene.

Charles and Henry Greene, (born 1868 and 1870, respectively), studied architecture at M.I.T. and began their careers in Boston. In 1893 their parents, who had moved to Pasadena, persuaded the sons to join them there and open a practice. While travelling cross-country, they visited the 1893 World's Columbia Exhibition in Chicago, and saw for the first time examples of Japanese architecture, which would strongly influence their later work.

The Greene's California bungalows and mansions combined this japonisme influence -- visible in the post-and-beam construction and overhanging eaves -- with the Arts & Crafts style of complete craftmanship (down to every detail of the Gamble House's interior and furniture). Their work also reflects Southern California's climate and notion of "gracious living," in its wide porches and intermixture of interior and exterior spaces.

While these Arts & Crafts houses are extraordinary when you really look at them, I had the experience of finding them quite ordinary at first glance. I realized, however, that they seem familiar because so much of the housing I've seen in the U.S., particularly on the West Coast, derives from Greene & Greene's style.

I had this sensation often in L.A.: that styles of form and living have originated here and then diffused throughout American culture. Ranch and bungalow housing, an anti-urban culture of mobility, fast food restaurants, styles of billboard and signage -- all omnipresent in America, but seemingly done here first, and done with greater energy and originality.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House (1917-21) is another of the city's most original and famous houses. Built for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall (and thus sometimes referred to as the Barnsdall House), it was the architect's first project in Los Angeles. The design reflects Wright's fascination with Meso-American (e.g.. Mayan) forms, but also incorporates motifs derived from the Hollyhock, the client's favorite flower.

Walking around this place at dusk, I was struck by what you might call Frank Lloyd Wright's otherworldliness. That is, how radically original his work could be, to the point where it just seems to have arrived from another planet. Perhaps in part it's a reaction to the unfamiliarity of Mayan forms -- but, on the other hands, that source language has been entirely reshaped here, and the Hollyhock House overall has no resemblance to a Mayan temple.

One factor in the strangeness of this building is how unable you are to date it, stylistically. It's not futuristic, exactly, nor ancient, neither particularly classical nor baroque; upon seeing it, you are likely to be at a loss, forced to look at it without the help of categories.

When the Hollyhock House was under construction, Wright sent a young protégé, Rudolf Schindler, to oversee it. Schindler, an Austrian emigre, had been associated with the famous Vienna architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos before emigating to the U.S and joining Frank Lloyd Wright's Chicago office.

In 1921, Schindler opened his own practice in Los Angeles, and as his first project designed a house to be shared with his wife and another couple. "Schindler House," as it has come to be known, was the architect's home and studio until his death in 1953, and became one of the city's most famous houses. It was also, for a time, the residence of Schindler's former schoolmate Richard Neutra, who was to become another of L.A.'s most important modern architects (particularly famous for his Lovell "Health House" of 1929).

Now surrounded by apartment buildings rather than the dramatic open space that inspired it, Schindler House was distinguished for its innovative tilt-up concrete slab walls, its Japanese-style sliding partitions and open plan, and its interplay of indoor and outdoor spaces. The house is now maintained as a study/exhibition center by the Austrian Museum of Applied Art, which notes:

Undoubtedly the Schindler House has been one of the most influential designs of the 20th century, and its daring innovations became commonplace by the time of the architect's death. The California House - a one-story dwelling with an open floor plan and a flat roof, which opened to the garden through sliding doors while turning its back to the street - became the established norm of postwar housing. The Schindler House is now recognized nationally and internationally as a totally new beginning, a genuinely fresh start in architecture.

For all its great influence, Schindler House is quite a modest, though beautiful place. The apartment blocks towering around it seem to be only grudgingly tolerating it, and one is hard put to get a very dramatic photograph. However, it's an interesting point, that modest structures can become famous and hugely influential. While the spectacular Getty Center may never influence another building, something "simple" like Schindler House can be a far more fundamental innovation, of far wider influence.

Frank Lloyd Wright's "Sturges House" of 1940 shows the architect at a totally different point in his evolution. Designed a few years after Fallingwater, perhaps the most famous of all Wright's works, Sturges House employs a similar cantilever effect, extending the front deck far outwards from a massive brick base.

What struck me about this house, other than its resemblance to Fallingwater, was the serenity and repose of that overall horizontal form, in contrast to the steeply sloping, curved, public street and driveway. The horizontal protrusion also creates a large outdoor space for the house's residents, but prevents you from seeing into it from the street, so they can look out freely without themselves being on view.

Finally, a relatively recent but still famous house: Frank Gehry's residence, in Santa Monica. Gehry's low-cost extension to the existing house, done with plywood, corrugated metal, and chain link, demonstrated the brilliant formal intelligence that would later produce the Bilbao Guggenheim. As with Frank Lloyd Wright's Sturges House, you sense a tremendous formal confidence here -- an almost eerie ability to shape raw space and materials into a resolved structure.