Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

This guide to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego starts in 1896, when newspaper heiress Ellen Browning Scripps bought a bare bluff-top lot for eight hundred dollars, and follows the concrete home architect Irving Gill later built there. It traces how a handful of La Jolla artists pooled money in 1941 to buy the house back for ten thousand dollars, and how later gifts, from a single donor's multimillion-dollar bequest to a semiconductor fortune, transformed that scrappy art center into the museum you see now. Look at the facade and consider how many hands its history has passed through.