So what with the cathedral, the Music Center, Disney Hall, the existing Museum of Contemporary Art by architect Arata Isosaki close by, the wonderful 1920s central library a little further on, plus a $1.8m scheme to spruce up the declining Downtown commercial district, all the talk was of city-centre revival in LA, of making a world-class cultural core at last that had nothing to do with the movies. It is certainly a real place- you can even walk, not drive, all around it, and find others doing the same, and it feels coherent - but Gehry himself was not so sure. "LA has a linear downtown," he remarked. "They want a European, 19th century sort of downtown. Maybe it's possible to have both."

The impossibility of LA ever having one main centre is proved by the simple existence of the city's single biggest cultural draw outside of Hollywood: the Getty Center. This astonishing art gallery complex, built as an acropolis high on a hill in Brentwood outside the smog zone, opened in 1997, complete with its own automated tramway to take you to the top. The collection is strangely disappointing, but Richard Meier's riven-travertine buildings, and the gardens and landscape by Robert Irwin and Laurie Olin are now settling in nicely. This is the cultural model of the real LA - miles from anywhere, complete in itself, essentially a resort village, what Frank Lloyd Wright would have called an "automobile objective".