Peter Cook: Peter Cook samples buildings by Morphosis, Rafael Moneo and Frank Gehry in his Grand Tour of Los Angeles.

A respectable Grand Tour in the eighteenth century might well have included a place of worship, a place of celebration and one of general day-to-day activity--exactly what is on offer in a twenty-first century downtown of Los Angeles that seems to be increasingly self-confident. Moreover, the pedigree of three new buildings has been established by the significance of the architects, two of whom are locals.

The latest of the three is the Caltrans (California Transport Authority) headquarters by Morphosis (AR July 2005); to see it while its sage, Thom Mayne, is still rubbing his eyes with delight at winning the Pritzker, gives you an added incentive to weigh up the merits of such architecture.

An essay in 'skinning', 'sheathing' or 'folding' (basically a related action), its self-confidence lies in the consequentiality of the components and an unswerving determination to keep it simple and keep it tough. It represents an amazing trajectory forward from the early houses and restaurants that played a dangerous (but frequently elegant) game of 'dare', between an extreme consciousness of material and patina against extreme edginess of placement. Now Thom wraps away: less dependent on eye-catching thrusts than his project in Klagenfurt, and clearly revving-up in anticipation of his next pair of city buildings in San Francisco (AR October 2005) and New York.

So the superimposition of strips: lit strips, concertina-ed strips and revelatory strips seem inevitable, even flattering the relatively dumb internal fit-out of the offices (not by Morphosis).

To my surprise, it is the reverse proposition that underlies Rafael Moneo's cathedral up the street (AR March 2003). A year earlier, its barn-like exterior had failed to entice me in and I tend to find his work uninspiring. How foolish; as soon as I did enter and was enticed past, or across, or below the various manifestations within, I realised that he really understands the theatre of cathedrals--an almost forgotten art. Through the slightly schmaltzy porch, and up towards a giant panel, the light decreases, the golden panel amazes and close to it you take a sharp turn to the right and into the big barn. Onyx layers take the place of the traditional stained glass, the floor slopes this way and that, more onyx swathes serve to delight and play deceptive optical tricks with the wall banners since they are (almost) the colour of the walls. Beyond all this, a series of side-chapels rise up into troughs of tailored light. The ghost of Sigurd Lewerentz there somewhere? Strange that Moneo has a preoccupation with twentieth-century Scandinavia, which also crops up in the Madrid railway station. But there are even stronger ghosts of the Gothic language of revealed and encased natural light.

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The crypt is an embarrassment, and I hear that the architects were leaned upon by the donor-conscious clergy, though once outside and still within the courtyard walls, you are reminded by the sunshine, and the calm and totally assumed faith of Spanish Catholicism, that this is still a Mexicano city. Across the street to check out Frank Gehry enjoying himself with the Disney Concert Hall (AR March 2004), where you can almost hear him and Esa-Pekka Salonen (the Philharmonic's conductor) chuckling over the result as they record Frank's voice as part of a Salonen composition.

Not that things were always a giggle: the apparent light-heartedness was bought over many years of to-ing and fro-ing with the funding and clients. In the end, though, its carcass is clearly more exquisitely poised and finished than Bilbao, and the theatrics are as cleverly programmed as those across the street. The foyers begin relatively ordinarily (by Gehry's standards), but as you meander upwards the spaces, the related solids and the revealed lanterns become more and more seductive. All that before the hall itself, which has some of the spirit of the Berlin Philharmonie even as it stretches itself against the shoe-box formula while peeking out at the sky.

So it dawns upon you that this city of dreams can be worked upon by master architects through a process of moving you through enticement, revelation, decoy, story-line. An architecture that parallels the wily ways of master film-makers.

But it also reminds me not to rely on lazy prejudices: Los Angeles is no longer just charming ticky-tacky but becoming now a serious city; serious architects whose mannerisms are not yours can, on form, remind you why others bother with them; and all those chirpy transport officials, overtly surprised and pleased to be in a quality building, are merely getting a little bit of the payoff that architecture was supposed to be about: namely, delight.