Los Angeles at the Limits. Reflexive Practice in a Late Capitalist City
A diffuse yet homogeneous urban condition virtually devoid of a public realm, thoroughly privatized and regulated by shadowy extra-governmental forces, a city spatially segregated between the haves and the have-nots: writers, urbanists, philosophers, and architects have all characterized Los Angeles as the direct urban manifestation of capitalism, the banal result of speculative real-estate development. Los Angeles has been so closely identified with capital that Edward Soja’s question becomes rhetorical: “What better place can there be to illustrate and synthesize the dynamics of capitalist spatializations?” 
Perhaps the most crucial recent reading of capitalism and Los Angeles occurs in Fredric Jameson’s essay and subsequent book “Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism.” Jameson barely remarks upon the city per se, describing it only as a reflection in the mirrored curtain wall of John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel: “The Bonaventure … is content to ‘let the fallen city fabric continue to be in its being’ (to parody Heidegger); no further effects, no larger protopolitical Utopian transformation, is either expected or desired.” The city becomes nothing more than the end product of multinational capital, losing any political capacity, utopian aspiration, or even reality beyond the surface glimmer. Reflecting away the city in its façade, the Bonaventure hides its street-level pedestrian entrance. Turning away from Los Angeles, the hotel instead proclaims links to multinational networks through its skywalks to adjacent skyscrapers and its privileged entry to vehicles from boulevards and freeways. 
Rejecting its immediate surroundings in favor of global capital flows, the Bonaventure is a metonymy for the damaged body of the city. Jameson describes the inside as a postmodern hyperspace, lacking any reference to what lies outside and so notoriously confusing in layout that it defies understanding. In its incomprehensibility, Jameson writes, the Bonaventure “stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible dimensions.” It invokes an analogue for the sense of disorientation in the multinational, decentered postmodern economy.
In 1983, when this essay was first published, late capitalism had already colonized all spheres of human activity including those, such as culture, that had remained autonomous from and resistant to its hegemonizing forces. For Jameson, the lack of a reality external to capital prevents the postmodern subject from drawing an accurate map of the system’s extent. This argument becomes the basis of Jameson’s “aesthetic of cognitive mapping.” Drawn from a compromised position within the system, the postmodern cognitive map proclaims its incompleteness and the subject’s entrapment by the system. 
Los Angeles in the Age of Limits

The dystopian vision of Los Angeles reached its nadir in the early 1990s after a series of traumatic events. The end of the Cold War shut down the defense industry, causing mass unemployment. The 1992 uprisings and the Northridge Earthquake of 1994 confirmed Mike Davis’s vision of the city as an inhospitable terrain, riven by physical and psychic fault lines. Led by Ed Soja, the critics of the LA School of Urban Theory read the tribulations of Los Angeles as emblematic of late capitalism’s vast economic restructuring—from a local economy of industrial mass production to a global service economy of information and media. 
Since the late 1990s, Hollywood’s continued dominance in cultural production, coupled with the city’s massive port system, has revived Los Angeles’s economy, helping to make it the second global city in the United States after New York. As the city’s economy has changed, so has its collective sense of geography. The furthest suburbs—in Orange County, Ventura, the Inland Empire, or Palmdale—have developed largely autonomous economies, becoming as distinct from Los Angeles as New Haven or Philadelphia are from New York City. Moreover, while “white flight” and the desire for ever newer and better suburbs previously drove the middle class out of the city, by the latter half of the nineties the city’s rich cultural life—and its polyglot diversity—attracted an influx of young, transnationally oriented professionals in the culture industry and related fields. Today sprawl continues on the periphery, but the city itself has little spatial or psychic connection to it. The promise of outward flight has been subverted as crime, drugs, and the growth of gangs have spread beyond the city core, overwhelming the small police forces of the suburbs.
Since reaching the surrounding mountains in the 1980s, the city has had to confront its spatial limits. As with late capitalism, expansion in Los Angeles must happen from within, not through colonization of new territory. Los Angeles has largely ceased to sprawl. What is by some measures already America’s densest city will inevitably densify further: between 2000 and 2015, the city is expected to grow from 3.7 to 4.5 million, with the county growing from 9.8 million to 11.5 million, while the larger region of Southern California expands from 17 million to 20 million—the equivalent of adding a city the size of Chicago to the area. 
Topography and demography are not the only limits Los Angeles faces. The unbounded possibilities promised by the modern master plan are giving way to a new interest in, even obsession with, rules and limits. Transportation planners have come to realize that increasing freeways is simply a losing battle: added lanes encourage longer commutes, exacerbating rather than alleviating traffic. Confronting this pessimistic conclusion, along with massive community opposition to building new freeways, planners now see traffic jams as a means of behavior modification, forcing drivers to reroute their commute or skip it altogether. Adding to this newfound awareness of the limits of the automobile, Los Angeles’s environmental regulations are the strictest in the world. Air pollution in the basin has been reduced radically over the last two decades: a cynic might say that the renewed interest in the city’s downtown may be because it is visible for the first time.  
Contemporary Angelinos are adept at lobbying against any form of change in their neighborhoods. The result is a proliferation of bureaucratic forces, including Neighborhood Councils, which proffer a PC NIMBYism, as well as environmental regulations, view preservation ordinances, historic preservation areas, draconian zoning codes, building review boards, restrictive covenants, and so on. The result is a landscape brought to near-stalemate by an intractable micro-bureaucracy of obstacles.
Reflexive Architecture
The city’s confrontation with limits is endemic to the global culture of late capitalism, a condition that sociologist Ulrich Beck has dubbed “the second modernity.” Having thoroughly reshaped nature, creative destruction, the motor force of both the first modernity and the first capitalist regime, now turns onto itself. In this condition, Los Angeles is distinctive for the thoroughness with which its blind faith in the tabula rasa and endless expansion has been transformed. The obsession of real-estate developers with greenfields has been replaced by a newfound interest in brownfields while loft renovations in the city’s formerly ignored eastern downtown have become the hottest avenue for real-estate growth. 
Also characteristic of second modernity are limits imposed from unyielding micro-forces that block creative destruction at every point. Only the most simplistic misunderstanding of capitalism still envisions it as a pure force for deterritorialization—merely “turning all that is solid into air”—for capital also reterritorializes, creating multiple conflicting logics as it turns inward upon itself. Under second modernity, conflicts and frictions among independent logical structures become the norm. Perhaps, then, we can understand the fractured forms of the earlier Santa Monica School as an attempt to work through these conflicts—and the attendant strain the city falls under—in the symbolic register. For these architects, typified by Morphosis, architecture responds to pressures, constraints, and the end of the first modernity by shattering—breaking into shards as if under external pressures. Structures striving to be autonomous and whole but deformed wildly by out-of-control forces, the products of the Santa Monica School serve as cognitive maps of the city even as they proclaim the futility of their condition. 
In contrast to their predecessors, who had understood the architect as an heroic master-builder even when that role was futile, architects who came of age during the city’s protracted recession of the 1990s found that negotiating this landscape of competing forces was not a detraction from “real” practice but their primary role: traversing zoning and building codes, appeasing intractable neighborhood groups, working with low-quality contractors, designing on seemingly impossible sites, acting as an environmental remediator, and sometimes performing all of these tasks at once. The bureaucratic forces overlaying Los Angeles’s terrain, coupled with the need to maximize economic return, constrained architects to predetermined building envelopes. The result is an architecture of limits, concerned with making the most of the least. 
This architecture “after capitalism” acknowledges the impossibility of working outside capitalism but takes that condition as fact—neither celebrating it as romantic union nor mourning it as compromise. Rather than assuming the remote (and arguably mythical) position of a critical commentator outside the system, these architects attempt to recode the contradictory demands that capital gives rise to in order to reflect on, disrupt, and reconfigure the contemporary condition.
Following Ulrich Beck, we might call the result a “reflexive architecture." This term is something of an imposition, as the practices discussed here do not generally refer to their work in those terms, but this is natural as reflexivity comprises neither movement nor theoretical position. Instead, reflexive practice is a process in which intelligent agents in second modernity instinctively participate. Just as some of the most significant architectural work of first modernity arose from an appropriation of found strategies and technologies in modernity, innovative architects of second modernity do not impose their ideals onto a situation as much as they derive a position—this also as opposed to a solution—from the condition at hand.
Reflexive practice implies both reflection and reflex. Reflection refers to an awareness of the perpetual need to reinvent oneself in contemporary society as one practices; it can be in any medium and any field. The result is an oeuvre in which new projects ceaselessly rework problems raised by earlier ones to form a body of work that coheres not through methodological consistency but methodological evolution. Yet while contemporary practitioners in Los Angeles are on the whole more versed in theory than their predecessors, reflexive practice also refuses to produce the kind of totalizing theories that informed the architecture of the early 1990s. It refers instead to an instinctual drive to confront society as if through reflex, crystallizing the consequences of what it cannot assimilate—in Los Angeles’s case the contradictions created by capitalism itself—and using that as the basis of a poetics. 
The 1992 exhibit of six speculative urban housing prototypes entitled Re: American Dream demonstrated a crucial generational shift in Los Angeles architecture. Curated by architect Roger Sherman, the show was predicated on the idea that the dominance of the single-family detached house in Los Angeles inexorably imprinted the urban fabric with an atomized, privately-owned texture that prevented large-scale revisions. 
Against all existing models, the six participating practices—Janek Bielski, Central Office of Architecture, Johnson + Favaro, Guthrie + Buresh, Mary-Ann Ray, and Sherman himself—proposed the single-family detached house as the object of densification. The “Urban House,” as the practices collectively called it, was studied not as an isolated architectural set piece or fragment—as were the Case-Study Houses and neo-avant-garde works of the Santa Monica School—but rather as an urbanistic problem. Eschewing the previous generation’s use of shattered forms as a means of criticizing the city and the profession, these architects reconstructed existing zoning practices, proprietary relationships, plot configuration, views and light, as well as changes in the building type itself, in order to propose incremental but significant alternatives to the existing order. 
Guthrie + Buresh WorkHouse
Given the collapse of the real estate market in the early 1990s, such work was largely confined to the speculative. A remarkable exception was Guthrie + Buresh’s 1997 WorkHouse, an outgrowth of the practice’s proposal for Re: American Dream. For the exhibit the architects reimagined the city fabric in terms of three street types: Hybrid, Private, and Open, each defined by the use of the street and different configurations of living and working spaces. Implementing the Hybrid strategy, WorkHouse began with the architects’ purchase of a small bungalow on a 40 ft by 115 ft lot on a busy street in West Hollywood. The neighboring area was filled with hybrid buildings of various configurations, often containing live-work units, their owners resistant to change in occupancy patterns.
Guthrie + Buresh proposed replacing the small bungalow with a one-bedroom apartment on the street front to provide rental income while serving as a buffer against boulevard noise. Behind it, the architects planned a larger unit for their office and residence. As they needed a place for their practice and their family, Guthrie + Buresh constructed this rear WorkHouse first while retaining the bungalow provisionally as a rental unit. 
With its restrained formal vocabulary, WorkHouse stands in contrast to the designs of the Santa Monica School; its interior spaces remain open and unprogrammed to serve as what Buresh terms a “suburban loft.” Compositionally the project manifests the complexity of site and program—or, as the architects call it, “script.”. The 1,800 sq ft WorkHouse occupies the maximum building envelope allowable by local code, yet avoids an oversized appearance through a parti of two interlocking volumes. Articulating the scripts of living and working as separate yet interdependent, the volumes also define intermediate exterior spaces between themselves and in relation to the adjacent structures. In opposition to the typical inward focus of the single-family house tract, WorkHouse develops shared visual spaces between adjacent structures, creating what the architects called an “optical piazza” that challenges the expected psychological opacity of the property line. Likewise, the translucent membrane on the side elevations both preserves and questions privacy for residents of WorkHouse and their neighbors, revealing glimpses of movement and activity inside as light conditions change. This urban strategy continues through the interior. At points of conflict between script and site or working and living, Guthrie + Buresh express the contradiction through materials—as when the opaque plywood sheeting of the interior slips behind the translucent membrane of the studio. 
Pollari X Somol Off-Use House
If Julius Schulman’s photograph of Los Angeles from the living room of Case Study House 21 was iconic for its age, demonstrating the mid-century’s faith in technology , perhaps the contemporary condition can be summed up in Deborah Bird’s night photograph of Pollari X Somol (P X S)’s own house, Off-Use. The car taillights streaking before the galvanized steel façade exemplify conditions the architects faced in building an office-residence on a difficult site. Zoned for residential use but located at the intersection of two extremely busy thoroughfares, the site was a rare tabula rasa, passed over during previous building booms. The approximately 80,000 cars passing the site everyday and the bus stop located at the corner account for the site’s relatively low cost. 

Accepting the challenge to make opportunity of adversity, P X S built a structure that engages the busy corner rather than withdraws from it. Siting their house in a narrow zone at the property line enabled the architects to create a generous, protected yard in the rear. The primary design efforts are concentrated on the barrier wall on the street, doubling as a billboard for the architects’ practice. The interior of the wall is faced with their library bookshelf—the books providing visual noise analogous to the ever-present sound of the automobile while aurally dampening it.  
P X S conceived the house as a “ranch-loft” or “one-room motel,” evoking in an office space the mythically easy life of 1950s Los Angeles and the fluidity of modern spaces. “Critical lounge,” the term P X S confers on this attempt to rediscover the golden promise of suburbia in today’s difficult conditions , stands in stark contrast to the deliberately difficult work produced by the architects of the previous generation. Instead of an angst-ridden anti-hero, it conjures up the figure of the laid-back Hollywood producer. As with the Hollywood producer, however, so with the Off-Use house: the image of ease masks a keen intelligence and the ability to carry out cunning negotiations.
JohnstonMarkLee
Founded by Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee in 1998, JohnstonMarkLee posits Los Angeles’s contemporary urban condition as a series of layers in which existing, often invisible, forces impact new interventions. The response they offer avoids simplistic contextualism, archaeological practices, or postmodernist pastiche, in favor of negotiating with the full complexities of a given situation. 
In the case of Hill House, JohnstonMarkLee treated the structure as a palimpsest of desires, produced by site conditions, legislative forces, and economic demands. The building site provides a panoramic view of Santa Monica canyon, but is defined by an uneven slope and irregularly shaped lot. Given the expense of real estate in the area, it became clear early on that the building envelope would have to be maximized. The uneven sloping site suggested that contact with the natural terrain and the amount of soil moved needed to be minimized for reasons of economy. 
As significant as the site’s physical demands were the limits imposed by the Coastal Commission and the Hillside Ordinance, which required new buildings to follow the contours of the hill as a set of cascading volumes. To form an envelope around volumes, JohnstonMarkLee adapted the building envelope directly from geometries given by the city’s own codes, thereby avoiding the need for a variance, which would have incurred risk and costly delays. The supporting volume was tapered in order to minimize the amount of program intersecting the ground. This allowed for a perpendicular angle between the supporting walls and the site, creating greater structural efficiency. Poché spaces between the envelope and programmatic components were turned into storage spaces. 
At the Sale Residence, JohnstonMarkLee had the luxury of a flat site, but had to confront a notable preexisting structure, Morphosis’s 2-4-6-8 House (1978). This 400 sq ft meditation studio and garage served as an ancillary building for a 1,000 sq ft 1920s Venice beach bungalow. After a fire gutted the bungalow, JohnstonMarkLee was asked to replace it with a 1,600 sq ft structure. 
JohnstonMarkLee approached their intervention on the lot as a model for maximizing development in the area and creating a more consistent front on an adjacent urban walk street. Instead of following the traditional practice of dispersing space to the periphery of the site, they enveloped it within the maximum allowable building envelope. As a result the architects were forced to integrate the existing 2-4-6-8 House into the radically altered site. In their research on the Morphosis project, the architects found a drawing proposing a hypothetical, centrifugal composition of four units, all variations on the 2-4-6-8 theme. While property boundaries prevented that construction, JohnstonMarkLee adapted the model, spinning two of the units into the rest of the site. The first volume, largely replacing the beach bungalow, became a solid mass, the middle unit turned into a void, while 2-4-6-8 house became a volume. All rested upon a socle that provides a unifying element and encloses the space. Extrapolating Morphosis’s formal process-based methodology, JohnstonMarkLee’s solid unit refers to the centripetal rotation embodied in 2-4-6-8 House through its windows. Instead of a literal replication, however, the centripetal rotation generates window-like spaces formed by poché elements.
Escher GuneWardena
Faced with similarly difficult conditions, the firm Escher GuneWardena, founded in Los Angeles in 1995 by Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, has created trans-modernist structures that reflexively register the effects of second modernity without resorting to indexical strategies or symbolic representations. 
Like JohnstonMarkLee’s Hill House, Escher GuneWardena’s Jamie house in Pasadena is sited on the kind of impossible condition that comprises many of Los Angeles’s remaining plots—a tiny lot with a 71 percent slope. Rather than fighting the hill, Escher GuneWardena set the house on a steel bridge atop two concrete towers, saving money by reducing the number of caissons required. Occupying a mere two percent of the site’s square footage, the towers allow the hillside to flow beneath the house, preserving critical drainage patterns while allowing vegetation to flourish. The resulting floorplate is 84 ft by 30 ft, the maximum footage permitted by code for the site.

The house’s structure is a conventional lightweight wood balloon frame, an approach the architects adopted as a reaction to the conservative nature of the construction industry. Given the precarious site, however, they also understood that regular exterior maintenance would be virtually impossible and so clad the structure in panels of durable fiber cement board. Working in the modernist tradition of the objet-trouvé, the large window units and glass doors are off-the-shelf items.
Conclusion
That experimental work in Los Angeles architecture is so focused on the single-family house demonstrates a shift in architecture “after capitalism.” In the seventies the New York Five adopted the single-family house as a site to which “critical practices,” primarily concerned with advancement in the academy, could retreat, avoiding the messy world of capital, politics, the urban realm, and the failing legacy of the avant-garde. In contrast, as Re: American Dream suggested, the contemporary renewal of interest in the urban house is not motivated by a desire to withdraw from real practice but rather by a need to engage with the new realities of postmodern micro-politics. The house becomes a stage for an architectural micro-political intervention and an implicit cognitive mapping of the city. It becomes a site for real practices and real interventions.

If Koolhaas’s Bigness heralded the heyday of the architectural 1990s, one can’t help but wonder if this position has been played out, at least for the moment. New economic realities have resulted in the recent cancellation of a number of Big projects and, after 9/11, Bigness implies targetability. Like the brontosaurus, then, Bigness is exciting and even awe-inspiring, but has difficulty surviving in troubled times. Moreover, could Big projects have become the very opposite of what they appear to be? Could they be, to paraphrase Fernand Braudel, mere surface froth upon the vastly more powerful waves that traverse the ocean—waves made up of many potent atomizing and bureaucratizing forces dominating the contemporary city? If micro-political forces rule the contemporary urban terrain, then perhaps architecture after capitalism should operate neither in retreat from politics nor in allegiance with remnant giant powers, but rather  toward an architectural micro-politics activated by swarms of smaller, intelligent mammals, maximizing their interventions through subtle, cunning moves.