British Critic Reyner Banham

Reyner Banham, the British architectural historian and critic who spent six years visiting Los Angeles to write his celebrated “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” has died of cancer in London, it was reported Tuesday.

He was 66 and died Saturday, the Associated Press said.

Banham, who had lived in the United States since 1976, spent those years examining the diverse edifices of this country, ranging from modern office buildings to grain elevators.

To write his comprehensive 1971 examination of Los Angeles, he learned to drive, perceiving early in the years of visits that preceded the book’s publication that the city could be understood only from a driver’s point of view.

He considered Los Angeles a quintessential American city and divided his writings between its ranch house restaurants, its beachfront “square boxes” and what was then the lack of a true downtown core.

“Los Angeles,” Banham concluded, “is the Middle West raised to flash point, the authoritarian dogmas of the Bible Belt and the perennial revolt against them colliding at a critical mass under the palm trees. Out of it comes a cultural situation where only the extreme is normal.”

Born in England, Banham received a doctorate from the Courtland Institute of Art in London in 1958 and worked on the staff of Architectural Review magazine.

He taught at University College in London before moving to the United States, where he became chairman of the department of design studies at New York’s State University at Buffalo. In 1980 he became professor of art history at UC Santa Cruz.

Banham was an adviser to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 when the Malibu institution chose Richard Meier as architect for its new complex.

He wrote two other widely studied books, “The New Brutalism” in 1966 and “Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment” in 1969.