In 1895 Charles Lummis wrote against the transplanted nature of the Midwestern architecture that abandoned the use of indigenous architectural materials. He disliked designs that adapted to the new arid conditions of Southern California with the addition of a "little more porch and a cheaper construction."

He was a proponent of adobe and resented architecture that denied the integration or understanding of local history. The Mission Style of architecture represented to him an accurate understanding of the past. As the eclecticism of the new spread, however, the romantic Ramona myth of Mission Revival would eventually be acknowledged to be as much a fiction as any of the other European architectural influences that blossomed during the creative construction of early Los Angeles.

The panoramic views of William Amos Haines from UCR / California Museum of Photography's permanent collection depict an assortment of European architectural influences found on the dirt streets of a sprawling young city. The illusion of city wide continuity that exists in these block-long scenes is the prediction of the automobile and the promise of an exotic, full grown, hybrid landscape dotted with imported palms, pepper and eucalyptus.

In Haines' photography we see a block of Greene and Greene inspired California Craftsman homes standing next to neighborhoods of Victorian Queen Ann, Old Pasadena Tudor Revival and Morgan inspired Mission Revival. The architecture of public buildings can be described in terms of Spanish, French and Richardsonian Romanesque. The synthesis of a Los Angeles Style seems an impossibility. The structures that stand next to one another are architectural amalgamations as laden with disparate influences as Jean Ruiter's desert constructs.