It isn’t by design that this issue has so many subjects about or made in Los Angeles — skaters on Venice Beach, a modernist house by John Lautner, Jeffrey Deitch’s vision of the city’s art scene, portraits of Johnny Hallyday in downtown LA, a graphic interpretation of its architecture by Nicolas Alan Cope… In less than a century, LA has grown from an outpost of 15,000 people to a megalopolis of 16 million, while hanging on to its connection to the natural world around it — the sea, the desert, the mountains, and the enveloping blue sky. LA is Western culture’s final frontier, capital of the Pacific Rim, and the mecca of American film, where history is fictionalized for popular audiences. The city has even been instrumental in creating a style of suburban architecture — in the ’60s, when Richard Neutra transformed Bauhaus sensibilities into West Coast domesticity. LA’s art…