The Los Angeles Times architecture critic takes his mother-in-law, and then all of us, on a tour of nine stops through the city: “I sort of tied myself in knots trying to produce the list. I had to balance architectural significance against geography: the buildings had to make up at least a semi-coherent loop, rather than forcing us to hopscotch all over the map. I also wanted the choices to suggest some kind of narrative progression, some sense of how architecture (and Los Angeles) changed over those decades.”