Reyner Banham

Architectural historian and critic, England
Reyner Banham was an iconoclastic British architectural historian and design critic
whose irreverent writings spanned an enormous range of topics and audiences—
everything from traditional architectural history to discipline-bending academic studies,
from advocacy criticism for his avant-gardist contemporaries to journalistic popular
culture reviews. Trained first as an aeronautical engineer and only later as an architectural
historian under Nikolaus Pevsner at the Courtauld Institute in London, Banham was
fascinated by questions of technology and technological expression. Acting something
like modernism’s guilty conscience, he challenged mid-20th-century architecture to
realize its earlier unfulfilled promises of functionalism and machine aesthetics.
Simultaneously, he celebrated the actual technological achievements realized by the
popular cultures of the industrialized world. He turned a sharp eye toward the potato
crisp, cult films, surfboards, California air shows, and London Raves and found in them
the promises and achievements of a culture living at the speed of the machine.
After leaving behind his wartime career as an aeronautical engineer and a short-lived
career as a newspaper art critic, Banham enrolled in the prestigious Courtauld Institute.
There, he quickly won the admiration of Pevsner and within a few short years found
himself in dialogue with London’s most interesting architects and artists and on the staff
of the Architectural Review. Like many around him during the difficult postwar years, Banham developed a
strange joint infatuation—on the one hand obsessed with the inaccessible splendor of
U.S. consumerism and on the other admiring the late Surrealist and Abstract
Expressionist strategies of formlessness and material ineloquence. The fusion of these
two gave rise to the so-called Independent Group in London—a group of Pop-affiliated
artists and architects that included Banham, Peter and Alison Smithson, Eduardo
Paolozzi, Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton, John McHale, and Nigel Henderson,
among others—out of which commenced Banham’s struggle to craft an “architecture autre.” During this
period, he was the studio critic for the movement known as New Brutalism and
passionately endorsed its material and technological facticity and its proto-Pop interests
in American advertising.
With the publication of his doctoral dissertation Theo ry and Des ign in the F irst Machine Age in 1960, Banham
gave academic rigor to his earlier enthusiasms. In a rich and convincing
study, he outlined two competing tendencies within the history of the
Modern movement, one compositional and traditional, the other dynamic
and technological. Upending the familiar arguments, Banham claimed that
the International Style, often considered to be a functionalist architecture,
was in fact essentially a symbolic and aesthetic movement. In
contradistinction, Banham championed the work of the early-20th-century
Italian Futurists and Buckminster Fuller, whom he claimed had more fully
internalized the dynamism of machine-age culture. Quoting Fuller,
Banham characterized technology as “the unhaltable trend to constantly
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accelerating change.” He concluded Theory and Des ign with a polemical challenge to the
profession:
The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he
will be in fast company, and that, in order to keep up, he may have to
emulate the futurists and discard the whole cultural load, including the
professional garments by which he is recognized as an architect. (Banham,
1960)
Extrapolating from the conclusions of Theo ry and Des ign, Banham wrote a number of essays in the 1960s
that examined the impact of “second” machine-age technologies on architecture. With an
eye toward things such as television, inflatable buildings, demountable geodesic domes,
mobile homes, and “architecture-less” drive-in movie theaters, Banham argued that the
traditional architectural virtues of permanence and monumentality were becoming
increasingly irrelevant. As he put it,
When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires,
lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi reverberators,
antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters—when it contains so many services
that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the
house, why have a house to hold it up?… what is the house doing except
concealing your mechanical pudenda from the stares of folks on the
sidewalk? (Banham, 1960)
This line of argument reached its zenith, at least in an academic sense, with the
publication in 1969 of Banham’s discipline-stretching study The Architecture of the Well Tempe red Envi ronment. Discreetly posing as a
history of environmental technologies (for example, lighting, ventilation, heating, and air
conditioning) and loosely extrapolated from Sigfried Giedion’s canonical Mechanization Takes Command (1950), in
actuality Banham’s argument was a revisionist end run around the genealogy of
modernism, an attempt to imagine (and instigate) an autre architectural future.
However, any description of Banham would be only half complete if it ended with his
vision of the good life lived mechanically in a “polythene bag.” Just as surely as Banham
was a careful reader of science, he was also an enthusiastic reader of science fiction. His
was a pop sensibility as comfortable with robots and Martians and bikini-clad warriors as
with ventilator flows. From his earliest days with the Independent Group, Banham had
celebrated the excessive technological imagery of the American post-war consumer
boom. He wrote lovingly of Detroit’s baroque chrome ornament, the physiognomy of the
American hamburger, drag racing and custom-car culture, Star Wars , ice cream wagons, and even
Disneyland, Coca-Cola, and the Santa Monica Pier. Given these infatuations, it was
probably inevitable that Banham would find himself drawn to the United States, and after
several extended study and research tours in the mid-1960s, he eventually relocated for
good in 1976, first to Buffalo and then to California.
It was with the California dream of a tanned noble savage—that New World polyglot
of surfboards, rock and roll, balloon frames, freeways, “gizmos,” and mad scientists—
that Banham discovered his long-sought synthesis between the cultures of consumerist
affluence and technological potlatch. His brilliant 1971 book Los Angeles : The A rchitecture of Four Ecolog ies paints a celebratory
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picture of a city infused with the rhythms of bodies and cultures in motion. With its
bronzed warriors, endless sunshine, and endless freeways (which necessitated that he
learn to drive in order to “read Los Angeles in the original”), Banham had found at last an
urbanism in which “mobility outweighs monumentality” and that sparkled with the
fantasies of endless self-invention and renewal. For Banham, Los Angeles was “a
reasonable facsimile of Eden” (Banham, 1971).
The impact of Banham’s writings echoed into the second half of the 20th century. If at
times his critique of the profession of architecture seemed totalizing and radically
pessimistic, when he did discover architects whom he liked—figures as diverse as
Archigram, Bruce Goff, the Japanese megastructuralists, or James Stirling—Banham’s
wide-eyed enthusiasms proved disarmingly contagious. His obsessions with hygiene,
waste, and the nonvisual body undoubtedly will only continue to grow in theoretical
importance. His eloquence on behalf of the American techno-vernacular had, with the
exception perhaps of J.B.Jackson, no equal; and, if regrettably some of Banham’s
writings now seem compromised by an irreverent sensibility—long on the furry, the
puerile, and the machismo—the radical character of his scholarship and the eloquence
and playfulness of his pen guarantee that Banham will continue to provoke, please, and
astound.