Los Angeles at the Limits. Reflexive Practice in a Late Capitalist City
The comments (as they always do in track changes) look much more extensive than they should. Most are stylistic suggestions. Interesting and thoroughly researched. At times, in the intro, the background research overwhelms your text, so that it reads a little as filler between quotes. I know its hard to let go sometimes, so I’ve made some suggestions as to how to cut a few and how to restructure. I also think you might use late capitalism a few too many times. I’ve tried to suggest some substitutions.
I also think that at times you are trying to cover too much ground—and it comes off as overlygeneral. For example, while I appreciate the attempt to summarize the history of architecture’s relation to capitalism in the 20th C. (and it is a VERY impressive feat to do that in 3 paragraphs), I don’t think you have to be responsible for that and think it weakens the other parts of your essay.   The strongest parts are when you’re specific rather than general. Also, to make the essay fit within the allotted space (with the images) the front section needs to be tightene a bit.
“[T]he industri-opolis presumably had achieved its goal, to fashion L. A. into a national model for the modernist city: efficient, sensually liberating, strangely free of an urban center, like a cognate of abstraction in art, a Rothko painting where the center floats in an existential absence,”
Kazys Varnelis
Los Angeles as Late Capitalist City
A diffuse, homogeneous urban condition virtually devoid of the 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  as to make rhetorical Edward Soja’s question, “What better place can there be to illustrate and synthesize the dynamics of capitalist spatializations?”. 
(combine the above into one paragraph
Above all, however, any discussion of capitalism and Los Angeles must address Fredric Jameson’scorrelation, between Los Angeles and capital by in his essay and subsequent book “Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism”. Jameson barely remarks upon the city per se, describing it merely as it is reflected 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 endproduct of multinational capital, losing political capacity, utopian aspiration, and any reality beyond the surface glimmer. 
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 negation of a (is negation the same thing as resultant lack of?)reality external to capital prevents the postmodern subject from drawing an accurate map of its extent. The Bonaventure exemplifies this condition reflecting the city in the its façade but also in hiding its  street-level pedestrian entrance. The hotel proclaims allegiance (affiliation?)to networks of multinational capital through skywalks?to adjacent skyscrapers and in its vehicular links to  boulevards and freeways. 
The link between these two paragraphs seems awkward, and perhaps contradictory, since the building connects outwardly to networks of capital, but then that its focused inward. I like both the points, but perhaps note could be made of that apparent contradiction.
Inwardly focused, the hotel becomes a replacement for the city—a postmodern hyperspace utterly disconnected from the city, notoriously confusing in layout, defying visitors’ 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.” The Bonaventure serves as an analogue for our inability to identify our position in the multinational, decentered networks comprising  (you use late capitalism a little too much..). 
Jameson proposes our inability to map our place within late capitalism as the basis of what he calls an “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. (Either this needs to be expanded, turned into a footnote or cut.)In contemporary Los Angeles, the task of cognitive mapping has transformed again,  integrated into advanced architectural production as it reacts to the pressures of the late capitalist city.
Los Angeles in the Age of Limits

Los Angeles as a “damaged urban body,”  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 massive unemployment. Within xx   confirmed Davis’s vision of the city as an inhospitable terrain, riven by fault lines both physical and psychic. For many critics, including Soja and the (the school isn’t a critic, either need a couple of names or just start with “Many critics considered…”the tribulations of Los Angeles represented the manifestations of late capitalism’svast economic restructuring -- from a localeconomy of industrial mass production to a global service economy of information and media. 

(the next three paragraphs are a bit too long and awkward. I think they could be combined into 2 and re-organized..)

it seems you were trying to make a point about culture in the first one, and a point about georgraphy in the secon one, and by moving the ‘white flight’ sentence to the second paragraph it seems that we confuse the two a bit.
Since the late 1990s, Hollywood’s continued lead role in production of culture in postindustrial capitalism coupled with the city’s massive port system has somewhat stabilized Los Angeles’s economy enabling it to become 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 developedlargely autonomous economies, so as to become as distinct from Los Angeles as New Haven or Philadelphia are from New York City. Moreover, the “white flight” and the desire for ever newer and better suburbs that drove the middle class out of the city during the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, in the latter nineties saw the city’s rich cultural life – and its polyglot diversity – attract an influx of young, transnationally-oriented professionals in the culture industry and related fields. Sprawl continues on the periphery, but the city itself has little spatial or psychic connection to it. The promise of outward flight has been undone as crime, drugs, and the growth of gangs have spread beyond the city core, overwhelming the small police forces of the suburbs.

Having reached the surrounding mountains in the 1980s, the city now confronts 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,. Inevitably what is by some measures already America’s densest city will have to 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 demographics 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 freeways add to a region’s traffic problems by encouraging ever-more-distant development. (doesn’t this contradict what you just said about the reduction of sprawl?)Confronting this pessimistic conclusion, along with massive community opposition to building new freeways, planners now see traffic jams as a means of behavioral modification, forcing drivers to reroute their commute or skip it altogether. Similarly, Los Angeles’s environmental regulations are  thestrictest in the world. Air pollution in the Los Angeles 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.  
Angelinos, like other Americans, defend their property values vigorously, lobbying adeptly  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. With rising property values, Los Angeles architects confront a landscape consuming itself through high land costs and concomitant low quality construction where (design or building? I’m not sure what is brough to a stalemate) is 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. Los Angeles is distinctive in  the thoroughness with which the city’s blind faith in the tabula rasa and endless expansion has been transformed. Recently, Los Angeles real estate’s former obsession with greenfields has been replaced by an obsession with brownfields while loft buildings 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 – of merely turning all that is solid into air. For capital also reterritorializes, creating multiple conflicting logics as it turns inwards upon itself. Under second modernity, conflicts and frictions between 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 – together with 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 pressure from external forces. 
In contrast to an earlier generation of designers, who (maintained or established?)the role of architect as heroic master-builder, , architects who came of age during the city’s protracted recession of the 1990s (wouldn’t be protracted if it was just the early)  found negotiating this landscape of competing forces not so much adetraction from “real” practice but rather their primary role: traversing draconian zoning and building codes, appeasing intractable neighborhood groups, working with low quality contractors, designing on seemingly impossible sites, acting as an environmental remediator, sometimes performing all of these tasks at once. The bureaucratic forces overlaying Los Angeles’s terrain couple with the need to maximize economic return, constraining architects to predetermined building envelopes. The result is an architecture of limits, concerned with making the most of the least. 
The architecture “after capitalism” in these architects’ work acknowledges the impossibility of working outside capitalism but takes that condition as fact, not as a romantic union to celebrate or as a compromise to mourn. Rather, these architects take as their point of intervention not the position of a critical commentator safely in a mythical position outside the system (make a footnote) but rather recode the contradictory demands that capital gives rise to in order to create reflections on, disruptions, and reconfigurations of the contemporary condition. (really good)
The result follows Ulrich Beck again, in what we might call a reflexive architecture. This term is something of an imposition: the practices discussed here do not, in general, refer to their work in those terms, but this is natural: reflexivity comprises neither movement nor theoretical position. On the contrary, 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 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 – and this 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 rather through methodological evolution. Yet while contemporary practitioners in Los Angeles are generally more versed in theory than their predecessors, reflexive practice also refuses to sit still long enough to produce the kind of lockjaw theories that informed the architecture of the early 1990s. So, too, reflexive practice refers to an instinctual drive to confront society as if through a 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. 
Reimagining the Urban House 
A crucial generational shift in Los Angeles’ recent architecture was demonstrated with the 1992 speculative exhibit of six urban housing prototypes entitled Re: American Dream. 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 established an atomized, privately-owned texture which would prevent any large-scale revisions to the urban fabric. 
Against all existing models, the six practices participating – 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, relationships of property and ownership, plot configuration, views and light, and changes in the building type itself to propose incremental but significant alternatives to the existing order.  (great!)
Guthrie + Buresh WorkHouse
Given the collapse of the real estate market in the early 1990s, much 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 had 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 foot by 115 foot lot on San Vicente Boulevard, a busy street in West Hollywood. The neighboring area had been 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. The WorkHouse would provide rental income to help pay the mortgage while serving as a buffer against the boulevard noise. Behind it, the architects planned a larger unit for their office and residence. As they needed a place of their own first, Guthrie + Buresh constructed this rear WorkHouse while retaining the bungalow provisionally. (unclear – does he mean that they used it as an office?)
With its restrained formal vocabulary, WorkHouse stands in contrast to thedesigns of the Santa Monica school, its interior spaces open and unprogrammed to serve as what Buresh terms a “suburban loft.” The project manifests the complexity of program or, as the architects call it, “script,” and site compositionally. With the 1,800 square foot WorkHouse occupying the maximum building envelope allowable by local code,   an oversized appearance was avoided by providing a parti of two interlocking volumes. Articulating the scripts of living and working as both separate and interdependent, the volumes also sandwiched 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” to challenge 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 expressthe contradiction through materials as when the opaque plywood sheeting of the interior slips behind the translucent membrane of the studio. 
Pollari X Somol 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 faith in technology held during the 1950s, perhaps the contemporary condition can be summed up in Deborah Bird’s photograph of Pollari X Somol [P X S]’s own house, Off-Use, at night. The car taillights streaking in front of the galvanized steel façade demonstrate the 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 a day thatpass the site and the bus stop located at the corner, explainthe site’s relatively low cost. 

P X S saw this condition as a challenge to create opportunity out of adversity and built a structure that, rather than shirking from the traffic on Olympic, engages 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 main construction efforts are concentrated on the barrier wall on the street, which also acts as a billboard for the architects’ practice. The interior of the wall is faced with their library bookshelf - providing visual noise to echo the ever-present sound of the automobile,as the mass of books aurally dampens it.   
P X S configured the rest of their structure as  “critical lounge”: a “ranch-loft” or “one-room motel” to integrate their office together with the mythically easy life of 1950s Los Angeles and the fluidity of modern spaces. Critical lounge is a stark contrast to the deliberately difficult work produced by the architects of the previous generation. Instead of an angst-ridden anti-hero, it  evokes the myth of the Hollywood producer: deeply tanned and wearing sunglasses while driving down PCH in Malibu with the top-down. Yet, as with the Hollywood producer, so with Pollari X Somol’s house, this 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 interrogates Los Angeles’s contemporary urban manifestation as a layered condition, in which existing, often invisible, forces impact new interventions. The response they offer, however, 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. 
After thoroughly researching strategies for hillside construction, JohnstonMarkLee proposed four possible strategies: a tower (coming down onto) awk. “penetrating”? the hill, a slab hovering above the hill, a (counter) stairstep of volumes moving up the slope, and a cascade of volumes moving down the slope. As significant as the site’s physical demands were the Coastal Commission’s legislationand the Hillside Ordinancethat required any new building to follow the contours of the hill.  These constraints combined to  invalidate all but the fourth stragegy. (To better understand the nature of the project JohnstonMarkLee produced a three dimensional diagram of the entire neighborhood as product of these forces, a Hugh Ferriss-like commentary upon the constraints of zoning.) omit last sentence?
To form an envelope around the cascading 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. To minimize the amount of program intersecting the ground, the supporting volume was tapered. This allows a perpendicular angle between the supporting walls and the site, creating greater structural efficiency. In turn, the floor plate becomes active structurally, pulling the building back to the site. (unclear) Poché spaces between the envelope and programmatic components turn into storage spaces. 
At the Sale Residence, JohnstonMarkLee had the luxury of a flat site, but in turn had to confront a notable prexisting structure, Morphosis’  2-4-6-8 House (1978) . Morphosis’s design was a 400 square foot meditation studio and garage, an ancillary building for a 1,000 square foot 1920s Venice beach bungalow. After a fire gutted the bungalow, JohnstonMarkLee were asked to replace it with a 1,600 square foot structure. 
The architects took their intervention on the lot as a model for maximizing development on sites in the area while creating a better urban environment on an adjacent urban walk street. Rather than following the traditional practice of dispersing space to the periphery of the site, they enveloped it within the maximum allowable building envelope. As at the Hill House and in Re: American Dream, they created diagrams that would extrapolate the hypothesis produced by their intervention onto the whole neighborhood.
JohnstonMarkLee had to respectfully incorporate the 2-4-6-8 house within a broader site strategywhile the maximizing the building envelope. 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, becomes a solid mass, the middle unit turns into a void, while 2-4-6-8 house becomes a volume. All rest 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 they let the centripetal rotation generate window-like spaces formed by poché elements.
Escher GuneWardena
The firm Escher GuneWardena, founded in Los Angeles in 1995 by Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, has faced similarly difficult conditions, creating 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 typically impossible condition that comprises many of the remaining plots in Los Angeles today, a tiny scrap of land with a 71 percent slope. Rather than fighting the hill, Escher GuneWardena set the house on a steel bridge atop two concrete towers supporting two steel beams upon which the house rests, dramatically 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 underneath the house, preserving critical drainage patterns while allowing vegetation to flourish. The resulting floorplate is 84 by 30 feet, the maximum footage allowable by code for the site. (very clear description)
Given the effort of establishing a platform, the house itself is structurallyconventional, a strategy that the architects adopted as a reaction to the conservative nature of the construction industry. Escher GuneWardena thus proposed a lightweight wood balloon frame construction.. Given the precarious site, however, they also understood that regular exterior maintenance would be virtually impossible and so clad the structure in panels of Cempanel, a durable fiber cement board. Working in the modernist tradition of the objet-trouvé, the large window units and glass doors come from Windowmaster. 
(I might suggest the Wilson praetorius house be cut. Your description isn’t as compelling, and it souncs like its not necessarily built. Do you think its essential? And/or are the images great?)
In the Wilson-Praetorius house, Escher GuneWardena were confronted with the sort of commission that many architects would outrightly reject: a modest one-story addition to an existing Craftsman-style bungalow. The situation initially seemed intractable: requiring additional space but unwilling to move out of their neighborhood, the clients hoped Escher GuneWardena could design a second story. The architects, meanwhile, not only objected to constructing a project in an antiquated style, they also observed that the existing structure could not support the load without a massive retrofit. 
Escher, however, recalled one night soon after his arrival in Los Angeles when he had seen a house being transported down Sunset Boulevard. Due to an intervening hill, it appeared that the house was moving on its own, a phantasmagoric allegory of the city’s transitoriness. On a hunch, he called a house moving company, which assured him the existing bungalow could be jacked high into the air for a remarkably small sum. Escher GuneWardena now plans a new first story for the house – with contemporary materials and aesthetics – while preserving the bungalow for the second floor. Rather than seamlessly blending with the bungalow, the new first story contrasts the bungalow’s darkness with a light, columnar construction,. Emphasizing this theme of disjuncture, the architects did not object to the clients’ plans to create a highly decorative, even kitsch, interior for the first floor. 
Conclusion
That experimental work in Los Angeles architecture is so focused on the single-family house demonstrates a shift in architecture “after capitalism.” Beginning with the New York Five, the single-family house became 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 modernism. 
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, carrying with it a suggestion of a cognitive mapping of the city. As well, the house becomes a site for real practices, real interventions (interesting observation, but a bit of a derieve from your main argument. Would rather you end strong)
If Koolhaas’s manifesto for Bigness began the heyday of the architectural 1990s, one can’t help but wonder if this position has been played out, at least for the moment. Not only have a number of Big projects been cancelled lately, Koolhaas’s among them, but after 9/11 Bigness inevitably implies targetability. Like the brontosaurus, Bigness is exciting and even awe-inspiring, but ultimately 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 that are made up of many potent atomizing and bureaucratizing forces dominating the contemporary city? If micro-political forces rule the contemporary urban terrain, then perhaps there might be something to be said not for a retreat from politics nor an allegiance with whatever giant powers may still exist but rather for an architectural micro-politics formed by swarms of smaller, intelligent mammals, maximizing their interventions through subtle, cunning moves.