Surfurbia’s Booster

Reyner Banham loved Los Angeles. The British architectural historian, who died of cancer on Saturday in London at age 66, wrote about what he called “Surfurbia” better than most natives did. Banham, who was formerly a professor at UC Santa Cruz and frequently a lecturer at USC, was one of the first outsiders to acknowledge that Los Angeles was more than just a great big freeway.

Banham took seriously the city’s rich if eclectic architectural traditions, and his book, “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” became one of the works that newcomers to the city had to read to try to understand it. Los Angeles made its architectural mark not through public buildings, Banham contended, but rather in the design of private homes. “The quality and quantity of first-rate modern houses in the Los Angeles area is impressive by anybody’s standards,” Banham wrote in 1971--illustrating his point with works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, the Greene brothers, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Craig Ellwood and others.

Los Angeles buildings often don’t distinguish between indoors and out, Banham said, and the area’s best public space is actually its beaches. To know the city, however, one must obviously know its freeways, he said, admitting that he had finally learned to drive “in order to read Los Angeles in the original.” He read it beautifully.