Gehry's Edgemar Center, a retail complex on Venice's Main Street, is modest yet delightful. Built on the site of a former dairy plant, the building incorporates a wall fragment from the older building into its facade, resurfaced with green tile and bronze.

The streetside approach sweeps inward through a narrowing jumble of building forms, prefiguring on a small scale the grand approach of the Bilbao Guggenheim. Inside is a beautifully proportioned, half-enclosed interior courtyard, an inviting and dynamic space that appears to be quite popular with locals.

As with Frank Lloyd Wright's Sturges House, you are struck by how a highly individualistic, expressive building can at the same time answer to its users' needs perfectly. The interior and exterior spaces at Edgemar are whimsical and energetic, but at the same time it seems that every line and volume is measured quite precisely to ensure a comfortable scale and a balance between open / enclosed.

Just down the road from Edgemar is Gehry's much-photographed Chiat/Day headquarters, which is ostensibly whimsical -- giant binoculars by Claes Oldenberg form the entrance -- but actually rather stern, even forbidding to walk around. It feels more like a fortress than a toy.

Santa Monica now has its own art museum, located in the intriguing Bergamot Station Arts Center, a former railyard/warehouse complex converted in 1995 into gallery and artisan spaces. Bergamot is an interesting, deliberate juxtaposition of clean, polished surfaces -- framing the upscale art & crafts boutiques -- with raw concrete and rusting metal, suggesting the productive forces of industry or artist. It's loft-conversion aesthetic taken to the extreme, but done with enough confidence to avoid falling into kitsch.

One of Venice's many exuberant murals. I was wandering in the somewhat sketchy area near the Venice youth hostel, where Venice Beach starts, at dusk.

After this, I stopped at the Third Street Promenade, a heralded outdoor pedestrian mall in Santa Monica that proved extremely disappointing. Faux urbanism, chain stores and restaurants lined up enclosing a totally patrolled, contrived streetscape -- yuck. I'd much rather be in dilapidated Venice.