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, surfb...