High School #9 commandeers your attention, even as you’re zooming along the Hollywood Freeway in central Los Angeles.

Through the lens of Julius Shulman—that’s how many of us have experienced the iconic mid-century Modernist houses of Southern California.  Most famous for his portrayal of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22, in 1960, and Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House, in 1947, Shulman’s prodigious body of work is quintessential: luminous and memorably composed images, highly evocative of time and place. “He had an incredible eye,” recalls photographer Juergen Nogai, who worked closely with Shulman in recent years, “a vision for telling a story, sometimes in a single photo.”

Though Paul Rudolph’s newly renovated Art and Architecture Building at Yale has emerged as an object of admiration, if not adoration, it generated controversy—­as rough-edged as its bush-hammered concrete shell—from the moment it opened.

Daniel Libeskind, by happenstance or design, has practically become the official architect of Jewish museums worldwide, but that trajectory was near its beginning when he received the commission, in 1998, for San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM).

The building relies not only on the sharp-edged diagonals—sometimes a shortcut to dynamism and architectural self-assertion—that have been a mainstay in Libeskind’s work, but also on abundant calligraphic symbols, some more convincing than others.