"In many ways, then, the book is astonishingly extroverted. It's a book by an architecture office about the city it works in, not a book documenting that firm's work; and, as such, it serves as an impressive attempt to understand and analyze the city through themed conversations with other people, in a continuous stream of partially overlapping dialogues, instead of through ex tempore essayistic reflections by the architects or dry academic essays."<br />
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Comment from Robert Farrell: "Perhaps the answer to the traditional architectural monograph lies in the above discussed book. How boring it is to see glossy image after glossy image of an architects portfolio put on bookshelf. It seems at a time when most architects are not building much, that investigation should take the lead."

"In No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, American architect Michael Maltzan traces the transformations that have taken place in the city of Los Angeles since the early 1990s. Through a series of conversations with the city's leading artists and intellectuals, Maltzan explores such issues as real-estate speculation and future urban development, infrastructure, resources, site density, urban experience, political structure, commerce and community, attempting to transform our understanding of how each affects present-day Los Angeles. Intended to facilitate further dialogue on how to define the "City of Angels" at a moment when its identity is in significant flux, No More Play includes contributions by Iwan Baan, Catherine Opie, Sarah Whiting, Charles Waldheim, Matthew Coolidge, Geoff Manaugh, Mirko Zardini, Edward Soja, James Flanigan, Charles Jencks and Qingyun Ma."

"Los Angeles has been compared to a laboratory — an urban ground for experiments both prescribed and accidental. Laboratory is a perfect word. Enveloping, chaotic and mutable, LA is a nocturnal workshop where the constant experiments leave no time to tidy up and reset the data in order to start fresh in the morning. In LA, you are both the experiment and the scientist. One is forced to be the object of fascination and fray, while simultaneously judging and monitoring the urban experiment…<br />
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what is the new identity for a city whose entire life has been marked by its ability and desire to endlessly expand? Perhaps the lack of perceptible hierarchies — or, likely, the reality that traditional thresholds and boundaries in this city are hidden and constantly transgressed — makes LA a difficult case study in the urban milieu…<br />
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As an evolving being, its dynamics make description difficult. Perhaps it is not a city — perhaps it can only be described as Los Angeles."