Word: stucco
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...Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is ferociously intelligent, as well as the most neoclassical of the lot. The couple practice and build mainly in South Florida, so it is fitting that they are attracted to Mediterranean forms. Theirs is a swaggering, hard-edged classicism on the cheap. Out of stucco they make neo-Roman villas: stark, complicated buildings that recall the Viennese Adolf Loos and do not suffer in the comparison...
...buildings are easier to dislike than those of any other important American architect. They are often dissonant and usually constructed of homely materials -- unpainted metal and plywood, asphalt shingles, stucco, rough concrete. They typify no up-and-coming architectural trend. In the postmodernist era, when much fashionable architecture has been charming and playful and not much more, Frank Gehry's difficult, edgy buildings are singular and brave...
Location is as important to detective fiction as it is to the real estate business. The glitz centers of the Sunbelt offer the irresistible drama of drug traffic played against a background of pastel, stucco and palm fronds. Joseph Hansen (Fadeout, A Smile in His Lifetime, Gravedigger) offers an alternative to the macho, down-at-the-heels stereotype. He is David Brandstetter, a Southern California insurance investigator who is affluent, well dressed and homosexual. This subgenre is bicoastal; see George Baxt's novels, beginning with A Queer Kind of Death. The protagonist is a gay New York City police detective...
...rock house busted in south-central Los Angeles looked perfectly innocuous on the outside: a white stucco duplex with a neatly trimmed lawn. Inside, a hallway leading to a bedroom had been walled off. Behind the barrier, a surveillance camera was trained on customers in the living room. The drug salesman, sitting in a kitchen equipped with three telephones and a box full of cash, remained unseen behind a fortified door but was able to monitor the outer room via closed-circuit TV. Buyers spoke to the seller through an intercom. Money and drugs were passed through a tiny opening...
Tigerman's four-sided Roman arch is the most literally classical of the lot, although its instant statuary (stucco-sprayed mannequins) does madcap violence to any deeper notion of classicism. Graves' handsome copper-roofed arch is better behaved and more civic than the rest; it wants to be a real building. As for Pelli, the neomodernist turns out to be a cryptoprimitivist. His open-faced sandwich of long two-by-fours forms a kind of aboriginal latticework gate and seems Southwestern in the best sense: simple, staunch, serene...