Disney Hall is at one end of the civic center part of Downtown. Next to it you have the heroic 1960s concrete of the three-auditorium Music Center complex by architect Welton Becket: raised on a plinth, naturally. In this climate, unstained and unflakey, it looks tremendous. Gehry's building sets it off beautifully, an organic efflorescence at the head of Becket's classically symmetrical Beaux Arts composition. But while the old Music Center glows in the sun, its hard lines and textured flanks given new life by its modish new neighbour, Disney Hall itself strangely does not sparkle. Most of its stainless-steel cladding is a matt finish. It recedes, it mostly looks grey rather than silver. I know it photographs beautifully, but trust me: in real life it does not look so good. Try turning right round and look the other way, and there you find the new Roman Catholic Cathedral by the Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, winner of Britain's 2003 Royal Gold Medal for architecture, which is rather a grand accolade.

The cathedral is a far odder building than Gehry's. It is positively weird, pressed right up against a sunken freeway. In Britain we have power stations pretending to be cathedrals - think Tate Modern - while in LA they have a cathedral pretending to be a power station, right down to the angled louvres on the outside (light-scoops for the interior, as it turns out). It is a symphony of ochres - ochre concrete walls inside and out, ochre floor, ochre ceiling, ochre tapestries. Yet it is curiously powerful and affecting, a willfully eccentric asymmetrical building which could well come to be regarded as great.