L.A.’s Offramp Historian

When British architectural historian Reyner Banham’s “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” was published in 1971, it heralded a quiet revolution in the way cities were to be understood.

Los Angeles through Banham’s eyes was an impressionistic whirl through the novel territories of “surfurbia” and “autopia,” a Tom Wolfe-inflected jaunt through a world of Polynesian restaurants and monumental offramps, a lyrical evocation of “Angeleno freeway-pilots ... [whose] white-wall tyres are singing over the diamond-cut anti-skid grooves in the concrete road surface, the selector-levers of their automatic gearboxes are firmly in Drive, and the radio is on.”

“Los Angeles” was pure Banham: polemical, far-reaching, senses fully engaged. Though prevailing orthodoxy had decreed L.A. to be an anti-urban, culturally and socially bankrupt “stinking sewer,” it took Banham scarcely one sunset spin down Wilshire (Banham “learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original”) to declare that “the unique value of Los Angeles--what excites, intrigues and sometimes repels me--is that it offers radical alternatives to almost every urban concept in unquestioned currency.”

Against the high-minded prescriptives of European town planners, Los Angeles seemed to Banham not only an unfettered tribute to the “art of doing your thing” but a cautionary tale that “there are as many possible cities as there are possible forms of human society.” The form of the book was as novel as its argument: standard architectural accounts of Los Angeles that ignored everything--from the burger joints to the epic civil engineering projects--outside conventional architecture.

For Banham, these elements, as well as the city’s history and topography, provided the context of a city that otherwise seemed to have none. “New bottles for new wine” was Banham’s prescription for understanding the strange civic beast that lay before him.

As Anthony Vidler notes in his introduction to the new edition of “Los Angeles,” Banham was inspired by the pioneering work of German geographer Anton Wagner, who years before had compiled a massive survey (on foot) of L.A.’s “lived space,” finding a “quickly evolving landscape” marked by “geological dynamism,” a place of “stage-set cities” and “drilling-tower forests” where “tradition,” he concluded, “means movement.” Adapting Wagner’s approach, Banham tried to see the city for what it was rather than merely how it appeared.

One myth he constantly tried to bury, for example, was that Los Angeles is a city made by and for the car. Beneath the boulevards, however, lurked another palimpsest: “In historical fact, the whole culture of rampant automobilism has been created in an attempt to make sense of a situation left behind by a quite different form of transportation. Ironically, that form of transportation was precisely what is now being naively proposed as the cure for automotive evils: the electric train.” By the time Banham wrote “Los Angeles,” he was already an influential and respected critic of architecture and design and a leading historian (and apostle) of Modernism. As Nigel Whitely shows in his authoritative intellectual biography (“the writing, not the man, is the end in view,” he cautions), Los Angeles was just the sort of place Banham had been looking for. Banham, who was born in 1922 and had first studied engineering in college before switching to art history, had from his earliest days as Architectural Review staffer and literary editor of the British weekly The New Statesman revealed a passion not only for technology but also for the exuberance and instant obsolescence of American consumer culture.

In one early essay, “Vehicles of Desire,” Banham compared the work of architects rather unfavorably to the work of a Detroit auto body stylist. He picked fights with preservationists, whom he labeled “grown-up kids who can only cry when deprived of their security-blanket of ancient bricks and mortar,” declaring that “there isn’t a city in the world that wouldn’t benefit from some ruthless modernisation.” He championed the “New Brutalist” movement for its honest use of materials and forms, noting approvingly of one project that “water and electricity do not come out of unexplained holes in the wall, but are delivered to the point of use by visible pipes.”

He would later endorse the Centre Pompidou in Paris for roughly similar reasons but was careful to distinguish it from the high-tech architecture of places like Silicon Valley, where, he wrote, architecture was little more than a “smart shed with prettily colored ducts stuffed through its roof trusses.” In architecture, what was under the hood was just as important for Banham as all the pretty detailing.

With the publication of his landmark 1960 study, “Theory and Design in the First Machine Age,” Banham emerged as a preeminent historian and critic of modernism. The movement, for Banham, had originally united the form of the automobile and the building that sheltered it but had slipped into a “classicist” model, abdicating functional innovation and even the latest technology.

Banham rightly extolled the Fiat factory at Turin with its breathtaking rooftop test track as a monument to a “myth of modernity,” but even he was forced to note that the track was soon dated by faster vehicles. How could architecture, he wondered, hope to keep up with the planned obsolescence of Detroit? What did domestic architecture mean in an age when the domestic environment was being altered by household technologies, when, as Banham noted, “a housewife alone, often disposes of more horsepower today than an industrial worker did at the beginning of the century.”

As Whitely ably notes, Banham’s positions could be contradictory and in flux, and he was often overly optimistic about technology as a beneficial or democratic force. In “The Great Gizmo,” a discussion of transistor radios turns toward a critique of United States policy in Vietnam: “Because practically every new, incomprehensible or hostile solution encountered by the growing American nation was conquered, in practice, by handy gizmos of one sort or another, the grown Nation has tended to assume that all hostile situations will be solved with gadgets.”

His eye was no less instructive on roadside American motels or TVA dams than it was on European modernism. He could switch comfortably between more rigorous and more journalistic forms of writing, remarking that “having seen the mess that a Marx, a Mumford, a Levi-Strauss, a Galbraith or a Freud (let alone a Hoggart) can make by trying to handle light matters with heavy equipment, I felt I had license to do the other thing--and a better chance of being understood.”

Banham hit Los Angeles without much of a map--he chose to arrive at the “downtown” bus station because he assumed it would be closer to his Westwood hotel than the Santa Monica station--but he immediately liked what he saw, not merely the architecture of all stripes (from Eames to offramps, Ship’s to Schindler, Gehry to Gamble) but the inscrutable forces that made it all work.

He could be more than wide-eyed at times: “The freeway system is not perfect--what transport system ever is?--and even though it is vastly better than any other urban motorway system of my acquaintance, it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.”

Page by page, however, “Los Angeles” shifts fluidly from incisive urban theory to the more quotidian texture of a Joan Didion novel: Watching a woman coming off the highway on an offramp pull the mirror down and adjust her makeup, an event whose meaning he was to catch after repeated incidents, Banham writes: “That coming off the freeway is coming in from outdoors.... [A] domestic or sociable journey in Los Angeles does not end so much at the door of one’s destination as at the off-ramp of the freeway.”

His writing--and several of his most important books are still in print after decades--is replete with such moments. He once prophesied his own relevance in this regard while worrying about the evanescent nature of magazine writing: “The splendour comes, if at all, years and years later, when some flip, throw-away, smarty-pants, look-at-me paragraph will prove to distill the essence of an epoch far better than subsequent scholarly studies ever can.”

Decades on, there are moments when “Los Angeles” seems as dated as the David Hockey painting that used to adorn the Penguin paperback. It recalls a city of Manson, the Doors (“L.A. Woman” came out the same year), the last years of “Dragnet”--fading Technicolor seen through a scrim of smog. Banham’s L.A. seems irrevocably distant from the city whose demographic profile has in 30 years been completely rearranged, which saw its defense-contract economic footing collapse in the wake of the Cold War, the metropolis that burned and trembled through riots and earthquakes, whose traffic has gone from a modern marvel to a chronic social condition. But if Los Angeles changed, it is because all cities change, and what looked novel to Banham in 1971--the lack of a downtown, the culture of the highway, etc.--was to become a standard condition in many more cities than Los Angeles. “Los Angeles” deserves to be read today not for its prescience or as a quaint historical artifact, but as a model on how to read any city. Old wine Banham may be, but the vintage was never finer.