Frank Gehry and the Los Angeles River: It's a combination that makes zero sense (if you're looking strictly at Gehry's resume) and follows a natural logic (if you think about the interest the architect's work has long shown in L.A.'s linear infrastructure and its overlooked, harder-to-love corners).
And it might give Mayor Eric Garcetti a way to confront the growing conventional wisdom that he is sometimes paralyzed by caution, gun-shy about big-ticket or controversial efforts to remake the city.
The 86-year-old Gehry has been working for about a year on a wide-ranging new plan for the river.