The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 8 April 2014
by Nigel Whitely
Reyner Banham was an engineer, art historian and critic of architecture and design whose prolific output spanned decades between 1955 and his untimely death in 1988. Rising from a working-class background, he became a professor of art and architectural history, and was an untiring advocate of a technological culture vividly expressed in its creative design and building. Banham wrote hundreds of essays for various publications, both institutional and radical. He wrote several books of a more scholarly nature, but also idiosyncratic in his "pop" style (eg: Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, and Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies). Nigel Whiteley was, himself, a professor of design and studied under Banham. (This writer, too, took a college course from Banham, late in his career.) Whiteley's book is a dense critical biography of Banham that touches on the major themes in his work, his peculiar obsessions, his relaxed style, and his contradictions. To today's readers, Banham may seem a fairly obscure subject for such a sprawling review. Perhaps he remains best known within architectural circles, and even then, it is hard to determine what his longest lasting legacy may be.
Banham began his writing career as a graduate student in the early 1950s. At the time, and for long afterward, the mainstream arc of architecture was Modernism. And yet, even though LeCorbusier declared "a house is a machine for living in", Banham criticized the mainstream of Modernism as not sufficiently expressing advances in technology. Throughout the fifties and sixties, he extolled the virtues of sleek technological design, most visible in the streamlined chrome features of American automobiles. Banham promoted the idea of a building as being a machine to provide a fit environment for human activities. The form almost didn't matter at all, and any work that promoted architectural beauty was seen as violating his demand for the purity of technology. What kind of buildings would result from such "bloody-mindedness"? Well, we have several examples, most notably the History Faculty building at Cambridge, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It is often said that the latter is a profoundly ugly building, but it comes closest to Cedric Price's fun palace as a shell of services supporting a vast empty space for human activity. The idea is appealing and almost comical in its apparently chaotic design results. But there is a hard-headed determination in Banham's writing that supports this expressly technological development.
As the swinging sixties progressed, Banham went on to adopt the idealism of Pop art and design, primarily to wield it as a cudgel against mainstream design academicism. But there were contradictions in his writing. He could hardly have written more than 700 articles and not contradicted himself along the way. Whiteley treats Banham's contradictions directly and with some affection for his subject. Banham changed his mind, though he denied it. In the end, he comes off as a man who likes what he likes. His devotion to high-tech architecture of the 70s and 80s lacked perspective on the price architecture exacts from the natural environment. He dismissed Post-Modernism, though, in a sense, Po-Mo grasped technology as a given with a freedom to decorate for the people. One wonders what Banham would make of today's latest technologically sophisticated design, and what he might make of modern consumer products like the iPhone. He would probably love this stuff, though demand that the architecture be more honest in how it integrates the latest in our technology. Architecture is a profoundly conservative profession, when it gets down to actually building something. There isn't much bravery among clients, either.
This is a dense and engrossing book. Whiteley's work is a sampling of many late twentieth century architecture and design ideas. Banham was a boyish enthusiast of the latest in the very newest technology. He loved the sprawling popular chaos of Los Angeles. Expressive high-tech buildings were to be the subject of the book he was working on when he died. It is an interesting and broadly encompassing career, full of peaks and valleys and boisterous debate, captured well in Whiteley's book.
See Also:
[A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham]
[Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies and
Megastructure by Reyner Banham]