Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

by Reyner Banham, Reyner Banham

Reyner Banham examined the built environment of Los Angeles in a way no architectural historian before him had done, looking with fresh eyes at its manifestations of popular taste and industrial ingenuity, as well as its more traditional modes of residential and commercial building. His construct of "four ecologies" examined the ways Angelenos relate to the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills. Banham delighted in this mobile city and identified it as an exemplar of the posturban future. In a spectacular new foreword, architect and scholar Joe Day explores how the structure of Los Angeles, the concept of "ecology," and the relevance of Banham's ideas have changed over the past thirty-five years.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, History, Urbanism, Cities, Urban Studies, Design

238 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1971

About the author

Peter Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was a prolific architectural critic and writer best known for his 1960 theoretical treatise "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age", and his 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" in which he categorized the Angelean experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each ecology.

He was based in London, moving to the USA from 1976. He studied under Anthony Blunt, then Siegfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner invited him to study the history of modern architecture, giving up his work Pioneers of the Modern Movement. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham cut across Pevsner's main theories, linking modernism to built structures where the 'functionalism' was actually subject to formal strictures. He wrote a Guide to Modern Architecture (1962, later titled Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture).

He had connections with the Independent Group, the This is Tomorrow show of 1956 (the birth of pop art) and the thinking of the Smithsons, and of James Stirling, on the new brutalism (which he documented in The New Brutalism, 1955). He predicted a "second age" of the machine and mass consumption. The Architecture of Well-Tempered Environment (1969) follows Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948), putting the development of technologies (electricity, air conditioning) even ahead of the classic account of structures. This was the area found absorbing in the 1960s by Cedric Price, Peter Cook and the Archigram group.

Green thinking (Los Angeles, the Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971) and then the oil shock of 1973 affected him. The 'postmodern' was for him unease, and he evolved as the conscience of post-war British architecture. He broke with the utopian and technical formality. Scenes in America Deserta (1982) and A Concrete Atlantis (1986) talk of open spaces and his anticipation of a 'modern' future.

As a Professor, Banham taught at the University of London, the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also was the Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He also starred in the short documentary Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles.

Banham said that he learned to drive so he could read Los Angeles in the original.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in the midst of a bout of terrible, crippling nostalgia for LA after having to leave the city in late 2012 for grad school. I think it's somewhat of a literary trope about LA that people love it despite the fact that they really aren't supposed to. Honestly, the kind of love people like Reyner Banham and I have for LA just doesn't add up: You spend most of your time in awful traffic on terrible old freeways to navigate a grotesque suburban sprawl that paradoxically features almost nowhere to park, the job you can't find does nothing to help you meet the absurd costs of living, it's the exemplar of hyperbolic consumer culture, global warming has turned good weather into one more thing to which the wealthy westsiders lay exclusive claim, and the whole city is an architectural and urban planning disaster. And yet, Reyner Banham was a distinguished architectural critic who professed an unabashed love for the city. If you are not familiar with the technical vocabulary of architecture (as I wasn't when I read this), you will find some of it a bit confusing, but Banham was clearly writing with a wider audience in mind so you'll get enough out of it, as I sure did. His love for the city really comes through in the prose, and that makes it a real joy to read, even if you don't always know what he's going on about. His sudden, uncharacteristically dismissive attitude toward downtown is hilarious. I wonder what he would say about its current "comeback."

A nice supplement to the book is an old BBC (I think) special featuring him driving around LA listening to an eight-track in his car. I first saw it on YouTube but I've noticed it comes and goes. It even features his own nerdy narration. I recommend this book to anyone interested in architecture or anyone who's feelin' nostalgic about good ol' LA.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely thought-out, a serious analysis of the non-urban Urban Center without-a-center that is LA. Or was L.A. Necessarily compartmentalized, Banham's study takes an unrelated set of parameters and relates them from an overhead perspective on history, development, design, influences. What are now a deeply tangled set of cultural aspects were a little less so in 1971, when this was published. So something of a time-capsule, but one that looks imaginatively toward the future too.

It's not really fair to look at 2009 Los Angeles and pronounce judgements on Banham's vision; but it's fair to say that his optimistic and buoyant post-urban parsing of the course ahead hasn't evolved quite as he foresaw so long ago. Banham wanted to lay the foundation, it would seem, for the new direction in The American Lifestyle, it's minimum requirements, glories, idiosyncracies, conveniences and goals. But he pictures a world of wonder, a sunny, urban encyclopedia accessible by friendly freeway off-ramp, to each fortunate, smiling everyman of the future.

From the intriguing buildings of RM Schindler to the cartoon / drive-in schlock, Banham seems to have counted it all as fairly benevolent, a wealth of profuse intermingling, leading to an unpredictable if inevitable synthesis that would gel sometime in the future.

His vision of "Autopia", however, must leave the contemporary reader mystified :

"The banks and cuttings of the freeways are often the only topographical features of note in the townscape, and the planting on their slopes can make a contribution to the local environment that outweighs the disturbances caused by their construction..."

Surely, even thirty-eight years ago, the insight of this statement must have been fairly shallow :

"Furthermore, the actual experience of driving on the freeways prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes. As you acquire the special skills involved, the Los Angeles freeways become a special way of being alive, which can be duplicated on other systems ... but not with this totality and extremity."

L.A. was always a vast, epicurean Doughnut and Hole experience, though, so Banham can't really be faulted for a smart if otherwise all-doughnut perspective. To his credit, he's a shrewd judge of individual projects and architecture, rendering certain aspects of the city-in-the-making with deft & critical detail. It's on the Urban Planning And Design side where he might've wanted to hedge his bets a little more broadly.

Absolutely pick this up if you live in Los Angeles. It's a hard city to read, maybe not a city at all, and any solid attempt at getting an overall picture is a worthwhile one. Just maybe, the urban-center without-a-center IS a doughnut, after all.

As those post-ironists in Randy Newman's band will tell anyone who asks ---- "L.A. ! We love it !!"

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have found fully half of the books about Los Angeles were written by haters from the East Coast. It is refreshing, on the other hand, to read Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, written by a knowledgeable Briton who shows that he knows something about the place beyond the "fertile crescent" from Downtown through Hollywood and Beverly Hills to Santa Monica and Malibu.

Banham not only writes about the four ecologies -- namely the coastal cities, the foothills,the plains, and the connective tissue formed by the freeway network -- but also about the history of architectural styles that have marked LA, from the days of the Spanish to the architects of the 10th century.

I have also read Banham's equally illuminating book on Scenes in America Deserta, which led me to his book on LA architecture.

Well worth reading, unless you are a Southern California hater, in which case, Phooo on You!

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mr. Banham completely ignores all dynamics of poverty and racism in LA, which makes his book rather like an amputated limb analyzed at a great distance from both its body and the mob of wealthy LA boosters (including Banham himself) who removed it with a blunt axe. There are some insights, and it is both eminently readable (in fact its exaggerations and over-the-topness contribute to this) and full of pictures. But all in all, it is infuriating and just plain wrong more often than not.

I do like the idea of LA design, urbanism, and architecture as the language of movement. To some extent this is true, as Banham writes:

One can most properly begin by learning the local language; and the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree, as Richard Austin Smith pointed out in a justly famous article in 1965, and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life. So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.

What I find more significant, however, is that this is not true of everything and everybody, aside from how often the freeways completely cease to move at all, and the most common perception of LA is being stuck. This shows how the city has become a failure of movement, but perhaps in 1971 this failure wasn't entirely apparent. But more importantly whole sections of the city were intentionally left out of this movement, freeways facilitated movement above and around the 'ghettos', leaving them out of sight out of mind. And it's residents, most without cars, are left outside of this life of the city, and according to Banham, thereby unable to understand it. I think this is an important insight, but one I have extrapolated as Banham never makes this connection. Even when he highlights (in a most racist pun which I find rather unforgiveable only 6 years after the Watts riots)

And with the beginning of the sixties, and the passing away of the last PE connexions, no place was more strategically ill-placed for anything, as the freeways with their different priorities threaded across the plains and left Watts always on one side. Whatever else has ailed Watts - and it is black on practically every map of disadvantages - its isolation from transportation contributes to everyone of its misfortunes.

In his division of LA into 4 ecologies, he looks at Surfurbia, the Foothills, Autopia and...I still cannot quite get my head around this, the plains of Id. He writes:

The world's image of Los Angeles (as opposed to its images of component parts like Hollywood or Malibu) is of an endless plain endlessly gridded with endless streets, peppered endlessly with tickytacky houses clustered in indistinguishable neighbourhoods, slashed across by endless freeways that have destroyed any community spirit that may once have existed, and so on ... endlessly. Statistically and superficially this might be a fair picture if Los Angeles consisted only of the problem areas of the City proper, the small percentage of the total metropolis that urban alarmists delight to dwell upon. But even though it is an untrue picture on any fair assessment of the built structure and the topography of the Greater Los Angeles area, there is a certain underlying psychological truth about it - in terms of some of the most basic and unlovely but vital drives of the urban psychology of Los Angeles, the flat plains are indeed the heartlands of the city's Id [79].
These central flatlands are where the crudest urban lusts and most fundamental aspirations are created, manipulated and, with luck, satisfied.

How easy to write off the problem areas of the City proper, even though hundreds of thousands of people inhabit them. And don't get me started on the age-old exploitative connections between poor people, Black and brown people, and the satisfaction of (white) lusts and working out of unbridled desires. Such a labelling represents the projection of fear and desire onto a population from the outside, not the reality of life from within these communities. Ghettos represent much more than the contained repository for the Id of the white and wealthy. Though perhaps Banham is talking about any and all communities built onto the flatlands as his vast map indicates. But to group all of these areas together, even in the simple terms of architecture, seems a gross simplification.

I will end with Banham's own overblown claims, which at this point in time seem faintly ridiculous. There is much to learn from LA, but that it is a healthy and vibrant metropolis which should serve as a model seems very much in doubt. That he could believe it to be so so soon after the Watts riots is in itself ridiculous, unless he was impressed with how easily and geographically the complaints of the poor were contained.

On the other hand, there are many who do not wish to read the book, and would like to prevent others from doing so; they have soundly-based fears about what might happen if the secrets of the Southern Californian metropolis were too profanely opened and made plain. Los Angeles threatens the intellectual repose and professional livelihood of many architects, artists, planners, and environmentalists because it breaks the rules of urban design that they promulgate in works and writings and teach to their students. In so far as Los Angeles performs the functions ofa great city, in terms of size, cosmopolitan style, creative energy, international influence, distinctive way of life and corporate personality ... to the extent that Los Angeles has these qualities, then to that same extent all the most admired theorists of the present century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, have been wrong. The belief that certain densities of population, and certain physical forms of structure are essential to the working of a great city, views shared by groups as diverse as the editors of the Architectural Review and the members of Team Ten, must be to that same extent false. And the methods of [218] design taught, for instance, by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning in New York and similar schools, must be to that extent irrelevant.

Somehow, I don't think this claim of irrelevance has made much of an impact.

[Megan Augustiny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think that this book does a nice job of executing what it set out to accomplish; I'm just not sure I'm the best person to fully appreciate this accomplishment. This book contains fairly technical descriptions of architectural trends and phenomena endemic to Los Angeles architecture. I could have read a hundred more pages of its fascinating account of Los Angeles transit (or the lack therein), and I was delighted to discover that those quintessential boxy stucco apartment buildings found throughout the city are called dingbats. I did feel pangs of nostalgia for my home as I read, but I also felt often like I was drowning in a sea of architectural jargon.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something of an artifact, a little bit dated, 43 years after publication, since things don’t exactly stand still around here, but still a good resource for the student of Southern California history. Non-academic and entertaining, this one considers the area and its architecture from a slightly different angle than most books of this sort, looking at the “four ecologies” of the beaches, the foothills, the flatlands and the freeways as the major influences on the built environment and development of Los Angeles. Loved the chapters on all the great buildings (which seemed to concentrate on the international, modern and mid-century), the abundance of great pictures throughout, and the rich bibliography which will have me adding even more books to my already-groaning TBR list. Fun, too, to recognize a picture of a mid-century bank building located 3 blocks from where I grew up, knowing that just outside the right of the frame on the adjacent side street was a little medical building that used to house my mom’s OB’s office, the doctor who delivered both me and my sister.

[Nat]

Banham talks about the difference between the "well-balanced" meal of a hamburger you can eat with one hand and the kind that come ornamentally disassembled. Here's what he says about the latter:

"Assembled with proper care it can be a work of visual art as well; indeed, it must be considered as visual art first and foremost, since some components are present in too small a quantity generally to make a significant gustatory as opposed to visual contribution--for instance, the seemingly mandatory ring of red-dyed apple, which does a lot for the eye as a foil to the general greenery of the salads, but precious little for the palate" (p.93).

I've never gotten a ring of red-dyed apple with a burger. Is this some kind of mid century weirdness?

Banham could have profitably used terminology from Learning from Las Vegas in describing the difference between Jack-in-the-Boxes ("decorated sheds") and buildings like the Brown Derby ("buildings as signs") (p.94) (if Learning from Las Vegas had been written yet).

I didn't realize that "dingbat" was a term for a type of apartment building, rather than the little ornaments that those buildings usually have stuck on them (p.157).

There are what look like two arguments against driverless cars on p.202 that go as follows:

1. The marginal gains in efficiency of automation might be offset by the "psychological deprivations caused by destroying the residual illusions of free decision and driving skill" present in the current non-driverless arrangement.
1C. So we shouldn't automate driving.

2. The million or so human minds at large on the freeway system comprise a far greater computing capacity than could be built into any machine currently conceivable (this was in 1971, but presumably this is still true).
2C. Therefore, "why not put the greater computing capacity to work by fostering the illusion that it is in charge of the situation?"

Neither argument is very good.

Hippie L.A. girls (sitting outside something called Color Me Aardvark [which gets zero google hits]) are the Angeleno equivalent of Cockneys (p.217).

Wagner's Los Angeles...Zweimillionenstadt in Sudkalifornien from 1935 sounds super geil. Should try to track down a copy.

[UrbanPlanner_Shafaat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impact of the topography, geography, culture, history, resources, and planning is eruditely express in Banham (1971) as he establish the foundations of LA from the historically heralded land which needed natural resource of water to be cultivable or inhabitable and the planning to make a water provided land accessible to people. Accordingly LA, in contrast to the major coastal cities in the world that develop from the port towards inlands, developed in the California Gold Rush era and then expanded towards the sea – Surfurbia. These expanding areas of LA shared certain inherent order. For example, the making of the piers in the beaches of LA become most characteristic structures of surfurbia – a phenomena that ends by two facts: 1. End of railroad into Irvine Ranch which was not possible for normal subdivision for habitation, and 2. The topography changes and subsequent atmospheric changes.
Besides, Los Angeles was engaged with the small hills to east and west for habitation which run westward in geographical order instead of a sequence of development. This foothill ecology is all about narrow, tortuous residential roads serving precipitous house-plots that often back up directly on unimproved wilderness. Yet this ecology seems to come to an end because of the increasing scarcity of the suitable avenues for annexation on these foothills. Accordingly, associated interventions …alter the profiles of whole hills…that large-scale mountain cropping does (Banham 1971, 107). Another ecology for LA is the plains that have three requirements: 1. Land that could economically be improved; 2. Water to support; and 3. Transportation. These earlier ecologies of LA necessarily hint towards the fourth one: Autopia that illustrate the meaning of freeways for Angeleons like a social place going out of which means going outdoors. These freeways are dominant because of their vast physical appearance and being only alternative for such smooth and rapid mobility through the drivers that have been inherently trained for these freeways.

[Israel Vento · Rating 3 out of 5]

To the person who wrote in the margins of the LIBRARY copy first edition from 1971; idk what era you're from, could be 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's, 10's, or now 20's but you contributed NOTHING to my knowledge or insight. And your handwriting is miserable. At one point this nameless, ageless person wrote "A book written for architects" ... ... ... at least it was in pencil. It's historically a part of this book now, it shouldn't be erased. This person just Tom Riddle'ed/Voldemort'ed this book, they live in there now. I should re-request the book and write "you're an idiot"

anyway this was great. why i majored in art education instead of architecture is beyond me. This is a quintessential Los Angeles book. I live here, it's LA, most of the beautiful buildings mentioned have been destroyed so it reads like an obituary. very pretentious too, so many big words my dumb brat summer brain can't comprehend rn. written with a passion that translates on page. The connections between these ecologies was beautiful. The most memorable piece of writing was when Banham compares the highway as an extension of being outside. The car is so essential to living in this city, being at home and driving to the local store in your neighborhood is closer to taking a stroll, while the highway represents travel, it means we are going "outside". With the way Angeleno's live I connected with that sentiment in a very honest way.

Also; odd mention of Walt Disney that aligned w something I’ve been writing so I quoted it? Ray Bradbury says “Disney is the only man who could make a public transit system in the city that’s a spectacle, one that people would want to ride. Just make him mayor” loose translation lol

[ica]

god help me; winter 2025 is the most inconvenient thwarting timing for me to yearn for life in los angeles; and yet…

[Emilie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A love letter

[Aatif Rashid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though a little dated now (his chapter on freeways and traffic especially so), it's an illuminating futurist architect's appraisal of Los Angeles as an ideal postmodern city, full of witty insights and the kind of light, beautiful 1960s prose that non-fiction books these days in their quest for directness have lost. I think people still cling to conservative views of what a city should look like, and even if you don't live in LA, Banham's book can help you appreciate modernist architecture and will give you a interesting vision of the exuberant optimism of the mid-20th-century:

“The motor age, from the mid-twenties onwards, again tended to confirm the going patter, and the freeway network that now traverses the city, which has since added major aerospace industries to its economic armory, conspicuously parallels the five first railways out of the pueblo. Indeed the freeways seem to have fixed Los Angeles in canonical and monumental form, much as the great streets of Sixtus V fixed Baroque Rome, or the Grand Travaux of Baron Haussman fixed the Paris of la belle epoque. Whether you regard them as crowns of thorns or chaplets of laurels, the freeways are what the tutelary deity of the City of Angeles should wear upon her head instead of the mural crowns sported by civic goddesses of old.”

[Henry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know if this was the best book to read before bed every night because the writing could get pretty flowery until I wasn’t really absorbing any of it. But I liked the time-capsule aspect of “this is how one person viewed Los Angeles in the late ‘60s / early ‘70s.”

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can’t believe I hadn’t read this yet. It was truly hard to put down. While I disagree with the author especially on the praise of the freeway and the disdain for downtown, I respect his well researched opinions a lot. Though the book was heavy in some chapters on capital A Architectural language, it was overall an easy read. The layout of the chapters and ideas was appreciated, it was easy to pick up and put down. Banham is one of the better transplants to write about LA.

Side note: the paperback version I had printed the maps on both sides of the page which made the central area of LA incomprehensible in almost every map. Thankfully I am very familiar with what he is referencing, but I wish the publisher paid better attention to the legibility of the maps.

[Katie Tu · Rating 4 out of 5]

No city captures the imagination quite like LA and this book that’s written with an academic’s attention to detail and bibliography that reads like a who’s who of modern American architecture helps you appreciate the little gems off of the freeways and suburb lanes of this vast sprawling city. Starting as a humble Pueblo and evolving into the city of angels that it’s known today, the author breaks down the architecture of the city into four main ‘ecologies’ which roughly are the beach, the foothills, the plains and the freeways. With that in mind your mind is free to fill in the gaps from this useful framework that helps one understand this compelling city

[Connie Kronlokken]

This book, written about 1971 puts a positive spin on LA and its architecture. Mr. Banham, a British architectural critic, learned to drive to understand the freeways and seems to have a wonderful time deconstructing what he sees. "Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside." I am sure LA is now more crowded, but I myself enjoyed looking up at the hills with a little sickle moon hanging over them in the evenings, when I lived there long enough to get used to the freeways in 1990.

[David Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This sense of possibilities still ahead is part of the basic life-style of Los Angeles," concludes Banham, perhaps the first outsider to have positive, and original, things to say about L.A. Were he here in 2019 he might find less to like about the freeways he extolled and more to like about the downtown he dismissed. But he understood L.A., predicted the future desirability of Venice and was open-minded enough to see Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" as a perfect SoCal allegory.

[Pablo Magaña Fernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this classic book, Reyner Banham shows us the mighty City of Los Angeles - its architecture and design - in a very shinny light. The book is brief, clearly-written, and includes pictures that usefully allow readers with little visual imagination (like myself) to literally see what the author is describing. Now, while the ride is thrilling, and I recommend taking it, I cannot help feeling that the author's vision is, at the end of the day, blinded by too much sun.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful analysis of spatial Los Angeles by a British architect who honestly wants to understand how the sprawling city came to be this way and comes to some fascinating conclusions about it without employing the outsider sneer you usually find in books about Los Angeles from writers who live someplace else.

[Nate Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Join Banham in top form as he colorfully characterizes Los Angeles as something more than simply the urban environment defined by the car.

"There are as many possible cities as there are possible forms of human society, but Los Angeles emphatically suggests that there is no simple correlation between urban form and social form."

[Enrique Naranjo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Algo superficial en el análisis urbano de la ciudad, muy subjetivo con pocas referencias. Mucho mejor la parte arquitectónica, con una lectura completa que descubre muchas obras de calidad y poco conocidas. Por momentos el libro es redundante y no muy entretenido. Es recomendable leerlo aunque no sea un aporte actualmente... aunque en su época sí lo fuera.

[Jeff_mute · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you plan to read this solely to better understand, Los Angeles architecture, it will be disappointing. However, if you’re reading it to better understand how Los Angeles evolved from the time the Spanish controlled it, and an example of what solid research provides , this book is for you. It also provides one of the best explanations for why the car culture of Los Angeles is so important.

[Brandon Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The neon-violet sunset light that disquieted the sensibilities of West’s hero by making the Hollywood Hills almost beautiful, is also the light in which I personally delight to drive down the last leg of Wilshire towards the sea, watching the fluorescence of the electric lights mingling with the cheap but invariably emotive colors of the Santa Monica sunset.”

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

An L.A. love-letter, persuasive despite my own East Coast bias. Is there no stronger recommendation I can provide than to say that this book made me consider moving to L.A., if only for a moment? Lyrical, smart, concise, and well-researched: everything a book about a city ought to be.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend said this book makes him appreciate Los Angeles as more than a hellhole. I thought that the book finds artistry in hellholes. Regardless, anyone who compares Los Angeles to an orgy scene from the works of Genet and Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” is alright by me.

[Daniel Polansky]

The classic work of LA boosterism. I always love reading enthusiastic discussions of my adopted homeland, and Banham brings a lot of insight into the world's premier postmodern city, even if his encomium to the freeway system falls a little flat.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful celebration of Southern California and its architecture. It was published around 1980. It’s certainly not up to date, but it’s rare in that it “gets” Los Angeles. This is the city of unique style that I grew up in and not the plastic dystopia that is often portrayed.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

an excellent and entertaining overview of Los Angeles and its "ecologies," including the infrastructure and built environment of the highways. A bit silly, a bit dated, a bit too pro car.. but a fun read nonetheless

[Andrew Holmes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Far too intellectual and sociological to be viewed as a history either of architecture or Los Angeles society. Hard work and eventually I just gave up.

[Julie Butcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, this book was fascinating and I'm glad I read it.