On a drive to the beach one day through Los Angeles’ Wilshire Blvd., photographer Adrian Gaut was struck by the beauty of the buildings lining the street. “You go from these sort of crazy downtown skyscrapers to modern stucco stuff to postmodern stuff to glass and steel,” he tells us. “There’s this whole range of things, and I thought of it as a sort of conceptual framework for a project.”

Having honed his craft shooting commercial work for various publications, Gaut decided to continue documenting the myriad styles of architecture displayed along the boulevard. Four years later, the result is a 178-page book filled with color and black-and-white images taken along a 15-mile stretch—from Santa Monica to Downtown Los Angeles. Captured in his characteristic up-close style, the book presents powerful portraits of some of Wilshire’s most recognizable facades.■