WHAT HOUSTON’S GOT IN COMMON WITH LA-LA LAND L.A Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has this observation about Los Angeles: “This kind of city has grown so large — in economic and environmental as well as physical reach — that it begins to stretch beyond our field of vision.” Remind you of anywhere else? Hawthorne is responding in part to a New York Times article that blames the L.A. Times’s recent struggles on Los Angeles’s “absence of strong institutions to bind it together.” His response: we’re not the only ones like that — and it’s not entirely a bad thing, either. For a city like L.A. — and for example, he says, Houston — “The flip side of its great tolerance is a certain lack of cohesion, a difficulty in articulating a set of common civic goals.” Put another way, “The greatest thing and the worst thing about Houston are one and the same: Nobody cares what anybody else is doing.” [Los Angeles Times] Photo of West Loop: Russell Hancock via Swamplot Flickr Pool