Los Angeles at the Limits. Reflexive Practice in a Late Capitalist City
Kazys Varnelis, SCI-Arc
[draft, not for distribution, 3/2/3] 
For Praxis 5
Kazys, I really liked your paper. I think it is the perfect essay for this issue. In the last issue on landscape I edited a text by Charles Waldheim, that served as a basic introduction to the issues of landscape and answered the basic unasked question of “why do an issue on landscape.” So in a way, I think your text promises to answer that question for this issue of Praxis. “Why do an issue on Capitalism?” The implicit answer for me is, “well, things are changing economically and socially, and there is a need to register the impacts of those transformations and how they affect architecture and urbanism as theory and practice.” That’s one thing that Praxis is committed to- the interpenetration of the two. 
So… I see your essay introducing basic concepts like Postmodernism, cognitive mapping, etc. with a directed focus on LA. I mentioned that we were talking about the issue steering away from any sort of master-take on Capitalism, and rather presenting an issue of texts and works that represent a core sample of practices and responses to the “present moment.” I mentioned to you on the phone the idea of organizing the issue into “strategies” as opposed to building types or history piece, theory piece, feature project, etc. Your text does a nice job of proposing a kind of geographically specific portrait of a city, but also a reading of practices that share a kind of operational logic – or strategy: “reflexive practice.”
Hi Eric,
Many thanks! Your comments are great. I’ve tried to respond to them as best I can and have left significant changes to the text below in blue highlight together with your red comments for you to refer to. I did, however, make a number of small changes throughout that I did not track. It became rather obnoxious to see every paragraph filled with blue marks and I really doubt you’d care to approve each grammatical point, deleted extra space, or change in style. 
Los Angeles as Late Capitalist City
Said to be 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: over the course of the last century Los Angeles has repeatedly been understood as the direct urban manifestation of capitalism, the thoroughly banal result of speculative real estate development. 
Take critic Norman Klein’s observation of the dominant mindset of the early seventies in his book the History of Forgetting, “[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,” Such is the identification of Los Angeles with capital that geographer Ed Soja’s question in Postmodern Geographies, “What better place can there be to illustrate and synthesize the dynamics of capitalist spatializations?” is merely rhetorical. 
Above all, however, any discussion of capitalism and Los Angeles must contend with the correlation drawn, or more properly, inferred, between Los Angeles and capital by Fredric Jameson in his essay “Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism.” There Jameson barely remarks upon the city per se, but rather describes it negatively, as a mere 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 endproduct of multinational capital, losing political capacity, utopian aspiration, and any reality beyond that of a surface glimmer. 
Unlike Mies’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper, Portman’s – or is it Jameson’s? - Bonaventure proposes no aspirations to a better world, its mirrored surface rejecting the urban condition as if to fulfill the gloomy diagnosis made by Manfredo Tafuri in Architecture and Utopia. In this text, which Jameson later describes as foundational, Tafuri portrays the avant-garde’s mission as the bringing of order to the chaotic and congested capitalist metropolis through the plan, or, failing that, accustoming the bourgeois subject to the shock of the modern city through the induction of crisis. Architecture’s failure to repair the capitalist city – and the revelation that the only “plan” for reforming capitalism must be economic and temporal, not architectural and spatial – leads the avant-garde to exhaustion, reducing architecture to empty gestures, unable to say anything. 
When Jameson published his essay on postmodernism in 1983, late capitalism had reached a certain initial stage, having 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 resultant lack of any reality external to capital prevents the postmodern subject from drawing an accurate map of its extent. The Bonaventure exemplifies this for Jameson: not only does the building reflect the city away, it hides its street-level pedestrian entrance, instead proclaiming an allegiance to networks of multinational capital through ramps to adjacent skyscrapers as well as boulevards and freeways. 
Inwardly focused, the hotel is a world onto itself, a replacement for the city. Inside the Bonaventure, Jameson sees a postmodern hyperspace utterly disconnected from the city, notoriously confusing in layout, defying the visitor’s capacity to understand it. 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 of capital and communications comprising late capitalism.
Jameson proposes this incomplete attempt to map our own place in 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. Thus, we might understand early postmodern Los Angeles in the maps offered by the incestuous networks of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, through the doomed journey of D-Fens in Falling Down, or in the allegorical vision of the city in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. 
Nice intro to LA and the, now historical, postmodern discourse. 
Los Angeles in the Age of Limits

The damaged urban body, described so vividly by Mike Davis in his City of Quartz, reached its nadir in the early 1990s after a series of traumatic blows. The end of the Cold War eliminated some 174,000 jobs in the aerospace industry, ruining the local economy. Soon after, the Northridge earthquake, the Rodney King scandal and the subsequent uprising 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 LA School of Urban Theory, the tribulations of Los Angeles were dramatic, but only particularly strong manifestations of a vast restructuring within late capitalism: away from an economy of industrial mass production to a globally-oriented service economy based on the production and manipulation of information and media. 
Since the late 1990s, restructuring has attained a stable condition, at least provisionally, and the city has been able to recover with Hollywood and trans-Pacific trade leading the way. Coupling the primary importance of cultural products in postindustrial capitalism and the city’s massive port system, Los Angeles began the millennium as one of only two real global cities in North America, sharing that title with New York. Moreover, if “white flight” and the desire for ever newer and better suburbs drove the middle class out of the city during the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, 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. 
Not only has the city’s economy changed, its collective sense of geography has as well. The furthest suburbs – in Orange County, Ventura, the Inland Empire, or Palmdale – are too far away for most people to commute from and, having developed their own largely autonomous economies, can hardly be considered Los Angeles any more than New Haven or Philadelphia are New York City. Sprawl may continue in these regions, but the city itself has little spatial or psychic connection to it. Compounding this, the belief that further away is better 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 mountains surrounding the basin sometime in the 1980s, the city now confronts its spatial limits. As with late capitalism, so any expansion in Los Angeles must happen from within, not through colonization of new territory. Unsurprisingly, then, Los Angeles has largely ceased to sprawl, ranking near the bottom in a recent US News and World Report survey of the phenomenon in US cities. 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. 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 already the strictest 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.  
Since the typical American family’s most important investment is the home, Angelinos, like other Americans, defend their property values vigorously and have become adept lobbyists against any form of change in their neighborhoods or even in other areas they deem important, particularly those areas used for recreation. The result is a proliferation of bureaucratic forces, not only the new Neighborhood Councils, which proffer a PC NIMBYism, but also environmental restrictions, view preservation ordinances, historic preservation areas, draconian zoning rulings, 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 shoddy workmanship but also brought to near stalemate by an intractable micro-bureaucracy of obstacles to construction. As Jacques Derrida observed, Los Angeles is an emerging post-city, no longer definable by the unified body of the democratic polis, increasingly lacking the distinction between public and private.
Nice summary of the shift in the urban and psychic landscape of LA. 
Reflexive Architecture for a Second Modernity
Once again, Los Angeles serves not as a unique and singular phenomenon but as a surface upon which the forces of the contemporary economic regime register. The city’s confrontation with limits is not unique but rather endemic to the global culture of late capitalism as a whole, a condition that sociologist Ulrich Beck has dubbed “the second modernity.” As Beck explains, having thoroughly reshaped nature, creative destruction, the motor force of the first modernity – and by extension, capitalism - now turns onto itself. What is remarkable about Los Angeles is the thoroughness with which a city that placed such blind faith in the tabula rasa and endless expansion has been reshaped by second modernity. In this way, Los Angeles real estate’s former obsession with greenfields is now replaced by an obsession with brownfields while retrofits of loft buildings in the city’s formerly ignored eastern part of downtown have been the hottest avenue for real estate growth in the last few years. 
One of the strategic categories that we are looking at for the issue is the term “appropriation,” in which we are including projects by Lo-tek an others working in that vein. 
Should I mention that explicitly? Are there other categories in the magazine to engage?
It is also characteristic of second modernity that creative destruction finds itself blocked at every point by limits imposed from unyielding micro-forces. 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 are now the norm, not the exception. Perhaps then, we can understand the difficult work of the Santa Monica School of the 1980s as an early attempt to work through these conflicts – together with the attendant strain the city falls under – through the symbolic register. In this work, 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. Hmm.. is that what all the agitated form making was about?… should we question this explanation? (I think we should question Aron Betsky in general.) This is why I do say “Perhaps…”  
Yes! This is when it gets really good. 
Contemporary Los Angeles architects increasingly find that negotiating resolutions in this terrain of competing forces is not just an uncomfortable sideline but rather a principal task for the architect. Dismissing the heroic role of architect as master-builder, so crucial to both Gehry and the Santa Monica school, many young architects who came of age during the city’s protracted recession in the early 1990s understand the architect as a negotiator (new roles for architects)???? of zoning and building codes, of neighborhood groups, low quality contractors, difficult clients, even as an environmental remediator. I like this refashioning of the profession vein. Can you expand? As in virtually all postmodern cities, the bureaucratic forces overlaying Los Angeles’s terrain couple with the need to maximize economic return, constraining architects to predetermined building envelopes. Contemporary architecture in Los Angeles is by needs concerned with limits, with making the most of with the least. And perhaps the myth of architect as a master builder was nothing more than a myth, concealing the reality; taking a list of some of the significant works of the previous generation - Kate Mantilini, 2-4-6-8 House, the Carlson-Regis residence, Frank Gehry’s own house, and the Hayden Tract - we note that all are interventions within, or additions to, existing structures. 
It is in this context that Los Angeles becomes a site for practice “After Capitalism.” But just what “architecture after capitalism” might mean needs to be elaborated for over the years, architecture’s relationship to capital has been particularly fraught. The postwar alliance of modernism and the American corporate machine produced not only some truly remarkable works, it also brought architecture to the attention of the broader populace. Yet this alliance wound up damaging the field: counterculture attacks on capitalism in the 1960s depicted modernism as the tool of the businessman while the internal collapse of the mass market, big business, and big government indicted modernist architecture as well. If the field’s response from the early 1970s to the early 1990s was to re-entrench the discipline, through formalism, typology, postmodernism, deconstructivism, process and other forms of critical architecture, that response largely split the discipline into either a hermetic academicism that strategically withdrew from intervention and a theoretically uninformed, and increasingly unaesthetic business practice based on value engineering.
All this changed radically in the late 1990s as the avant-gardiste rhetoricof  the dot.com boom and the success of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao encouraged architects to believe that businesses would pay for radical architecture. Rem Koolhaas and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture proposed that surfing capitalism as a wave might be the most provocative position an architect could adopt in the present day. And yet, this new managerialism in architecture, so epitomized by Fast Company magazine and by Maya forms seeking to somehow represent the flows of capitalism, became irrelevant even more quickly than it emerged as the dot.com boom imploded. 
The architecture “after capitalism” that this article is concerned with acknowledges the impossibility of working outside capitalism but takes that condition as banal 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 – Jameson has already told us that is impossible - but rather recode the contradictory demands that capital gives rise to in order to create reflections on, disruptions, and reconfigurations of the contemporary condition.

The result is something that, following Ulrich Beck again, we might call a reflexive architecture. (if the boldface you added is for highlighting in the magazine and not just , I could go in and insert it throughout…it’s kind of nice) This term is something of an imposition: the practices discussed here do not, in general, refer to their work as “reflexive architecture”, but this is natural: reflexivity comprises neither movement nor theoretical position. Reflexive practice is a process that intelligent agents in second modernity instinctively take part in. Just as some of the most significant architectural work of first modernity arose because of the appropriation of found strategies and technologies in modernity, innovative architects of second modernity do not impose their ideals onto a situation so much as they derive a position – this also opposed to a solution – from contemporary conditions.
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 – resulting in an oeuvre in which new projects ceaselessly rework problems raised by earlier ones to form a body of work cohering not through methodological consistency but rather through methodological evolution. Yet while contemporary practitioners in Los Angeles are generally far more well-read 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 that offers a cognitive map of the postmodern city.
Reimagining the Urban House 
While 1992 was the low point of the city’s fortunes, a crucial generational shift in its recent architecture was demonstrated with the 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 and privately-owned texture which would prevent any large-scale revisions to the urban fabric. Neither could the model of the dingbat, four or five story speculative apartment complexes that had sprung up around the city in the previous three decades, be a solution. Such oppressive projects increased density but failed to improve urban life, ultimately leading only to homeowner protest and re-zoning to eliminate their further proliferation.  
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 shattered forms of the previous decade as a means of criticizing the city and the profession, this new generation of architects reconstructed as-found 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. 
Hmm… seems like an interesting take on critically re-imagining a building typology. If I were a skeptic I would say that the “house architects” are operating on such a small scale, “atomized”, within the codes of capital so as to render their work less than impactful. I might then further argue that it’s hard to engage “Capital” with a capital C through the boutique practices of the elite academic practices that you’re championing… Perhaps (and I’ve raised this issue at Praxis meeting) Praxis should be looking at the SOM’s, Portmans and Jerdes for this issue (Gulp!). And we’ve talked about including some critical takes on the AOL Time Warner project. 
BUT, I think (and I’ve argued this also) that the house, as atomized as it is, constitutes such a large part of the American urban landscape, is such a large part of the American Dream/Obsession, and such a large indicator of “the market” through individual property values, that it deserves some critical attention – which I think you’re giving it. Carry on!
See conclusion where I try to answer this position.
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 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 Street strategy from that proposal, the project 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 street front WorkHouse that 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. Needing a place of their own first, Guthrie + Buresh constructed the rear WorkHouse while retaining the bungalow provisionally. 
With its restrained formal vocabulary, WorkHouse stands in contrast to the complex work of the Santa Monica school, its interior spaces deliberately open and unprogrammed so as to serve as what Buresh terms a “suburban loft.” Instead, the project manifests the complexity of program or, as architects called it, “script” and site compositionally. With the 1,800 square foot WorkHouse occupying the maximum building envelope allowable by local code, relief from an appearance of being over-sized for the lot was provided by 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 not only between themselves but also in relation to the adjacent structures. In opposition to the typical inward focus of the single-family house tract and the expected opacity of the property line, WorkHouse develops shared visual spaces between adjacent structures thereby 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 preserves privacy for residents of WorkHouse and their neighbors as it questions it, revealing glimpses of movement and activity inside as light conditions change.This urban strategy carries over into the interior treatment of the building so that wherever script and site or working and living conflicted, Guthrie + Buresh investigate the contradiction through material choice. For example, the opaque plywood sheeting of the interior slips behind the translucent membrane of the studio. With Buresh appointed chair of the University of Michigan architecture program, the firm  relocated to Ann Arbor where it continues work in this vein but now informed more by the limits of climate rather than by site. 
(Hmm… sort of a let down. Any more info on the vein? It was getting good… does the extra stuff help?) I could add a couple of paragraphs on a water reclamation plant that they designed but that was unbuilt and is unlikely to be completed.
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’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 Highland Avenue and Olympic Boulevard, two extremely busy thoroughfares, the site was a rare tabula rasa, passed over during previous building booms. With an estimated 80,000 cars a day passing by the site and a bus stop located at the corner, however, the site’s relatively low cost seemed justifiable to many. 

Pollari x Somol saw this condition as challenge to create opportunity out of adversity and built a structure that, rather than shirking from the traffic on Olympic, engages it. By siting their house in a narrow zone at the property line, the architects were able 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 a bookshelf for the architects’ library - providing a sort of visual noise to echo the ever-present sound of the automobile even as it aurally dampens it.   Sounds great, what does it look like? Should be answered by the pix on the CD...(Ever read Concrete Island by JG Ballard? It’s a modern day Robinson Crusoe with an architect shipwrecked on a traffic island between highways…) Nope will  have to.
Pollari X Somol configured the rest of their structure in terms of their idea of “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 deliberate difficulty of work produced by the architects of the previous generation. Instead of an angst-ridden anti-hero, it seems to evoke 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, hard work, and 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. Here, 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 previous strategies for construction on hills, JohnstonMarkLee came to four possible typologies: a tower coming down onto the hill, a slab hovering above the hill, a counter stairstep of volumes moving up against the slope, and a cascade of volumes moving down the slope. As important as the site’s physical demands on the structure were the legislative forces of the Coastal Commission and the Hillside Ordinance which demanded that any new building follow the contours of the hill, thereby invalidating all but the fourth hillside typology. To better understand the nature of the project JohnstonMarkLee produced a three dimensional diagram of the entire neighborhood as product of these forces, an Hugh Ferriss-like commentary upon the constraints of zoning.
To form an envelope around the cascading volumes, JohnstonMarkLee adapted the building envelope directly from the city’s own codes, thereby making visible the 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 also allowed 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. Poché spaces between the envelope and programmatic components turn into storage spaces. 
Given the recent downturn in the economy, the original client pulled out of the project, but believing the maximization of economy on the site is a strategy that will ultimately be successful, JohnstonMarklee have found investors and are pursuing construction of the project. 
At the Sale Residence, Johnston MarkLee had the luxury of a flat site, but in turn had to confront a notable prexisting structure, the 1978 2-4-6-8 House by Morphosis. One of projects that put Morphosis on the map, 2-4-6-8 House was a 400 square foot meditation studio and garage, serving as an ancillary building for a 1,000 square foot Venice beach bungalow that had been on the site since the 1920s. After a fire gutted the bungalow, Johnston MarkLee were asked to replace it with a 1600 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. Thus, rather than following the traditional practice of dispersing space to the periphery of the site, they enveloped it within the maximum building envelope zoning codes would allow. As at the Hill House and in Re: American Dream, which served as something of an inspiration for this project, they created diagrams that would take the hypothesis introduced by their intervention and extrapolate it to the neighborhood.
In doing so, JohnsonMarkLee had to find a way to respectfully incorporate the 2-4-6-8 house within a broader site strategy. While the building envelope had to be maximized, a monolithic approach was out of the question. 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 upon the formal process-based methodology that Morphosis used, Johnston Marklee’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.GPS 
At the new home for the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Gary Paige Studios dealt with an existing condition reflexively, introducing not only a contemporary dialogue with previous layers of information and structure but also treating the building as a framework, a laboratory for the architecture of the future. 
By the late 90s, faced with skyrocketing rent for the school’s west side location, SCI-Arc’s administration set out to find the school a new and permanent home. While the Institute clearly needed a distinctive home to match the cutting-edge work produced within, associating a school known for diverse viewpoints and an ability to change rapidly with a particular style seemed like a lethal trap. The imperative seemed paradoxical: to create a signature building without an overbearing signature. 
Intending its new quarters to have an impact on the city fabric itself, the school set its sights on downtown and eventually located a shell structure on the industrial edge of the city core, in an area known as the Artists’ District. Built by Harrison Albright for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad in 1907, the Freight Depot building was one of the first cast in situ concrete buildings in the city. Some 1,320 feet long, the Depot served as an interface structure for many years, allowing freight trains to transfer their cargo to and from waiting trucks. By the 1960s, with freight rail having shifted away from central Los Angeles, the structure became a pillow warehouse and subsequently served as headquarters for a trucking company. By the 1970s, it lay deserted. Paradoxically, in its abandonment, the building came into a new life, appreciated for the first time for its innate aesthetic qualities, the extreme length and the incessant repetition of the 60 concrete portal beam frames and 120 loading dock bays – now stripped to the bare frame - a draw for film shoots and graffiti artists alike. 
In undertaking the commission, GPS remained wary not only of a heavy-handed intervention but also set out against seeing the job as one of mere preservation or renovation. Rather, the architects intended to acknowledge the building’s history, treating it programmatically as infrastructure while undertaking a strategy of amplification throughout. In Gary Paige’s words, “the Freight Depot was considered not as a historical landmark or relic of the past, but rather as an instrument of the present, as a building-landscape that could simultaneously reconcile past and future; local and global, material and immaterial to produce an emergent complex of programmed and unprogrammed spaces.” 
The building’s relentless linearity, evocative of the technological sublime, obviously carried the most possibilities, but building codes forced the construction of shear walls for earthquake and fireproofing that interrupted the length of the space. Although GPS preserved the linearity wherever possible, the architects also sought to mitigate for its lost experiential qualities by amplifying the physicality of the structure’s history. As Paige explains, “Among the profusion of images and high-velocity data streams, gravity and duration [remain] formidable forces; water still flows downhill, things fade and decay – in short, as Robert Smithson has so acutely observed, entropy is still made visible.” To this end, GPS successfully fought arguments from all sides – including from historic preservationists – for the whitewashing of the building’s heavily-tagged interior. The traces of human activity throughout the years has been retained, not so much to fix and preserve the building in some given point of its life but rather to reveal its nature as historical palimpsest. In so doing, Paige created a rough structure, evocative of the found objects of Art Brut and of LA’s dirty realism. At the same time, the heavily marked building frame makes it easier for students and faculty to envision the building as a laboratory, modifiable and continuously in flux, acknowledging that creativity and innovation are messy while underscoring the inevitable friction between the structure’s original purpose and the new use it has been put too.
If the Freight Depot was originally constructed to serve as infrastructure, in its reprogramming as architecture school it again becomes infrastructure. GPS understood the building treated as a permeable membrane, perpetually responsive to change. In response the architects configured the school’s presence within the concrete frame through the erection of several lightweight structures: buildings within buildings that not only reinforce the existing concrete frame, but increase its total square footage by 29,000 square feet. These units are clad, infilled or exposed in a variety of ways so as to reveal the properties of steel and to explore the relations between frame and cladding. In so doing, they remain understated, emphasizing the architectural over the more common tendency of interventions into existing structures to devolve into the merely ornamental or sculptural. The elements create specific, generic, and hybrid spaces such as corridor-gallery, lobby-gallery, and studio-gallery so as to create leakages between users and events. 
Escher GuneWardena. 
The firm Escher GuneWardena, founded in Los Angeles in 1995 by Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, graduates of Zurich’s ETH and California Polytechnic University in Pomona, 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 Johnston MarkLee’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.
Given the effort of establishing a platform, the house itself is far more conventional structurally, 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 commonly employed in domestic 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. 
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, evoking images of pilings under a pier or perhaps of a beach house that has had the sand removed from under it by a storm. 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. Sounds cool… Eric, I’ve got photos of such a beach houses… and EG used them in talking with their clients… I’ve included them on the Cds I sent you… you’re welcome to use them…
Central Office of Architecture. Elysian Park Residence
Eric, I have something on this structure, which is quite nice… It’s under construction and I’m visiting in Friday. Can it still go in? I kind of missed my appointment to visit it because of baby and feel rather bad about it. COA are good guys, very Corb re-interpreted through another lens besides Cornell. 

I’m dying of suspense, Kazys. I can’t wait for your conclusion. I guess I’m hoping to hear you pull it all together is the same smart and cutting way that you set us up. (any razor blades in your pockets?)
Some other random thoughts… 
I wonder what impact the post-dotcom thing has on practice. In retail it led to a resurgence of business attire after a period of business casual, and a shift from kakis to pinstripes- an obnoxious “lets get back to work” campaign from some clothing retailers. 
What is the relationship between academic practices and the economy? It’s a tough question, but I think there is an unspoken trend here that all the so called “critical practices” are also part time practices that teach, and therefore have a financial buoyancy that allows them to “dally” in the practice by doing an occasional furniture installation, or loft renovation, or house for mom, that they publish in (then) Assemblage – (Think Mark Rakatansky). My far flung (and perhaps corporately infected) contentious contention is that these practices are so remote (and self marginalized) from the workings of capital and the everyday, that they have no impact on it. Let’s see if what follows helps out...
Kazys, sorry for the delay. I think your text is awesome. I can’t wait to read more. Let me know what you’re thinking. 
Conclusion
That – with the exception of GPS’s SCI-Arc Freight Depot – experimental work in Los Angeles architecture is so focused on the single family house demonstrates a shift in how architecture might be configured “after capitalism.” With Five Architects, the single-family house emerged as a site to which “critical practices,” primarily concerned with advancement in the academy, could strategically retreat. Although most of the practices in this article – with the exception of Escher Gunewardena – teach, the academy itself is not what it was a mere decade ago. Thoroughly colonized by capital and reshaped by a student body that increasingly adopts a consumption model, the university increasingly demands not uselessness but utility, not research for research’s sake, but practice. The old opposition of teaching and practice is no longer so easily held. And certainly these are young practices that would jump at the opportunity for larger commissions when possible.
Above all, however, as Re: American Dream announced, this renewed interest in the 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. If Koolhaas began the heyday of the architectural 1990s with his manifesto for Big Architecture, 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, if Bigness suggests that it is possible to create Big projects today, we also have to recognize that these are, to paraphrase Fernand Braudel, mere surface froth upon the vastly more powerful waves that traverse the ocean. If micro-political forces dominate the contemporary urban terrain, then perhaps another avenue might be a micro-politics of architecture formed by swarms of smaller, intelligent mammals, maximizing their interventions through subtle, cunning moves.