A photographic essay of architecture and design in Los Angeles in  which light, shadow, pattern, texture, scale, and compression are leveraged as critical elements in crafting figural compositions. This graphic oriented process resists the inherent tendency to capture an entire edifice in a single frame, and instead offers a counterpoint in which the monumentality of canonical structures is compressed and abstracted in direct contrast with the more familiar human scale to generate the potential for new interpretations. An evocative dialogue unfolds amongst the idiosyncrasies of architectural details, but also establishes a dynamic juxtaposition between the monumental and the human to contribute to the visual storytelling of the built environment.