The McKinley Building doesn’t jut over the horizon. It’s not the city’s tallest, oldest or most significant architectural landmark, but it once was a building that assured you — after you walked into its soothing, European-style courtyard — that the world was a better place than it had seemed a moment before.And now we’ve lost it. By a City Council vote of 10-5 last week, demolition crews have won the city’s blessing to flatten the two-story 1920s structure. And, at this writing, they could move in with bulldozers anytime against the boarded-up and battered edifice on Wilshire Boulevard, just east of Western Avenue and just across from the Wiltern Theater complex. The façade of the office building, capped by a broad four-story tower, is still remarkable. With a tile roof and the Churrigueresque decorations of Spanish-revival classicism, it’s finished in a purple-magenta plaster that suggests Italy rather than Spain. The now legally inaccessible courtyard was eternal Mediterranean, with floating arcades and a large, burbly fountain surrounded by an outdoor café — one of the perfect semipublic spaces in Los Angeles. It was the kind of structure — virtually unique — that should exist by the hundreds in a city with this climate and history. Most importantly, the McKinley was part of a context, a historic environment. It stood across from the deco-masterpiece, near-contemporary Wiltern, and close to other late-1920s near-landmarks. The McKinley’s demise symbolizes the failure of efforts to preserve entire historic settings rather than saving a piecemeal relic here and there.