Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future

by Nigel Whiteley

An intellectual biography of the cultural critic Reyner Banham. Reyner Banham (1922-88) was one of the most influential writers on architecture, design, and popular culture from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. Trained in mechanical engineering and art history, he was convinced that technology was making society not only more exciting but more democratic. His combination of academic rigor and pop culture sensibility put him in opposition to both traditionalists and orthodox Modernists, but placed him in a unique position to understand the cultural, social, and political implications of the visual arts in the postwar period. His first book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (still in print with The MIT Press after forty years), was central to the overhaul of Modernism, and it gave Futurism and Expressionism credibility amid the dynamism and change of the 1960s. This intellectual biography is the first comprehensive critical examination of Banham's theories and ideas, not only on architecture but also on the wide variety of subjects that interested him. It covers the full range of his oeuvre and discusses the values, enthusiasms, and influences that formed his thinking.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction

515 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reyner Banham once wrote a major essay on the relative significance of the potato crisp as compared to the taco chip, with particular reference to structural strength, acoustic performance, and the role of women in society. He talked about Frank Lloyd Wright as a services engineer and master of air handling systems. He liberated architectural discussion from conventional aesthetics and wrote instead long, wonderfully-crafted romantic essays that are a joy to read, about power stations, grain elevators, and mini-skirts. He found architectural beauty in the sorts of places where conventional art historians are never seen: where men and women go to work in overalls and eat their lunch in boiler rooms. He wanted to interpret the kind of architecture - and the kind of beauty - that actually impinges on real lives. That is his context.

The photographs in this book - many of them by Banham's remarkable wife Mary - show cars, factories, and the technological bits of architecture. There are no neoclassical temples or Piranesi engravings, but the idea that the universe is a giant mechanical system is the eighteenth-century starting point from which Banham assessed everything: Stirling, Gehry, the Smithsons, freeways and surfboards in California, the work of Johnson and Kahn, fashion and industrial design, or a drive-in steakhouse in Buffalo.

When we ask how such a forma mentis was able to develop, the influence of Nikolaus Pevsner seems to have been determinant. This book's conclusion is subtitled "Changing his mind, or having it both ways?" According to Whiteley, Banham experienced a Freudian rejection of Pevsner, his Ph.D tutor at the Courtauld Institute. Well, it's the easiest thing in the world to find evidence for a preconceived notion, and sure enough Whiteley finds plenty of evidence, rummaging around in the writings, to prove how their deep disagreement about many things was, in his view, Freudian.

He assumes this is a terrible problem that requires explanation. The opposite is in fact the case. It would be worrying if, at the higher levels of education, where Ph.D. dissertations are discussed, there were no disagreements between teacher and pupil. The notion that such differences might be "traumatic" is strange; yet Whiteley adopts it for his critique of (let's face it) a much more brilliant thinker than he is. He discusses other disagreements not only between Banham and Pevsner, but also with Cedric Price, David Watkin (surprise, surprise) and others. Perhaps Whiteley has taken Banham's own repudiations of Pevsner too literally, and underestimates how profoundly Pevsner influenced him.

Of course about Los Angeles, hardly anyone agrees with Banham now. Driven as he was by the blind faith that characterises every Futurist and neo-Futurist, for him LA was the emblematic city of modernity. And so it is; but modernity's a problem now. Angelinos still enjoy his "Los Angeles: an Architecture of Four Ecologies"; but these days, critics like Ed Soja and Mike Davis also give us a more pessimistic, dystopian critique.

Whiteley accurately says that Banham took issue with Pevsner's conception of modernity as an orthodoxy. Actually, both were right. Modernism is indeed an orthodoxy (look at Allies and Morrison) but it also has liberating effects (look at Sarah Wigglesworth). For Whiteley, the debate is already resolved: Banham was the freedom fighter, Pevsner the old guard. That's an unfair characterisation of both. Pevsner, in his own way, was a thoroughgoing revolutionary, and there is no doubt that Banham's own radicalism owed much to his. If Banham had confidence in his own ideas, the guts to pursue them, and the spirit that enabled him to shrug off his detractors, one must ask where and how he learned to think so freely. But Whiteley merely labels him a "revisionist" who deviated from standard accounts of Modernism. Oh well, who cares? Banham has nothing to do with academic hair-splitting of that kind. Whiteley's intention is to place him in a context - and academia is the wrong context.

Banham contested other ideas, such as Charles Jencks' preoccupation with what things look like (signs and signifiers) rather than how they work and what their social significance is. Perhaps Whiteley, in feeling this needs to be explained, cannot see that a man like Banham might have thoughts and interests of his own, which are not the product of academic disputes. He feels these philosophical differences between Banham and others require explanation. "Why bother?" some may ask. Whiteley insists, but his explanations are weak: was Banham really "working class" and the others patricians? Hardly; and the contention is not borne out by Whiteley's highly reductive idea that (a) working class means Pop Art and (b) Pop Art was a big influence on Banham.

So he changes tack and opts instead for "classlessness". Banham's interest in technology (which in this book, risks appearing like the **only** thing he was interested in) is a manifestation of technology's irresistible onward march, sweeping along rich and poor alike. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would object to this. It's true that Banham's excitement about technology was ingenuous; but that's only on a superficial reading. His essays remain a beautifully written, funny, and very erudite alternative to straight architectural criticism. So rather than read Whiteley's opinion of Banham's opinions of Watkins' opinions of something that maybe isn't even there, read the man himself, and form your own opinion. Banham's ability to comprehensively subvert what is supposed to be true, was enormously refreshing. We need a lot more of that.