Skirball Cultural Center

Just off the freeway to your right, built low into the hillside, is the Skirball Cultural Center — and it's one of those places tens of thousands of people drive past every day without ever clocking what it is. It's a Jewish cultural center and museum, and it was designed by Moshe Safdie — the architect who, decades earlier, stacked those famous concrete apartments at Montreal's Habitat 67. This was his first big cultural building in the United States, and it opened here in 1996, deliberately tucked into the pass rather than shouting from a hilltop.

Here's the detail that delights kids and architects alike: inside is a full Noah's Ark — a wooden ark the size of a house, filled with some four hundred animals, every one hand-built out of salvaged and repurposed stuff. Giraffes made of mop heads and old baseball gloves. A serious building in a quiet pass, with a menagerie hidden in the middle of it.