Book Review: Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

Reyner Banham's writing has a wonderful flowing and entertaining style while maintaining an academic base. It therefore makes for a quick read, and an informative one. There are also many pictures, many of them taken by the author himself, of some of the more interesting architectural examples of the region.

Banham's purpose in writing the book is to set out four ecologies that have led the way to Los Angeles' unique urban arrangement: the beach (Surfurbia, as he calls it), the freeways (Autopia), the flatlands (The Plains of Id), and the foothills (Foothills; I guess creativity runs out at some point for everyone). Based on these four ecologies, Banham celebrates what he sees as the best aspects of L.A.'s development: beach-front lifestyles; the personal freedom provided by automobiles; an architectural style which mixes Spanish Colonial Revival with the mid-century modern architecture brought there by pre-WWII German exiles; and the expansion of residential and other architecture into, over, and seemingly hanging from the nearby foothills. Banham's other main point is that the early railroads, rather than the later highways, in the area led to L.A.'s current multi-modal form (as opposed to the traditional mono-centric urban form. The highways, meanwhile, simply followed the tracks of the railroads. "If there has to be a mechanistic interpretation, then it must be that the automobile and the architecture alike are the products of the Pacific Electric Railroad as a way of life." (p. 220)

Banham's adoration of Los Angeles, its design, and its planning carries the reader from chapter to chapter. He briefly mentions the environmental and social ills that are attributed to L.A., but never hints at the possibility that those ills are affected by the very design and planning which he loves. Despite whatever problems it may have, since L.A. has grown into the second largest city in the country, it seems that the format "works." This success, Branham suggests, contradicts the work of many authorities on planning. "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 of a great city, in terms of its 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." (p. 218) Banham's main weakness, as I see it, is that the aforementioned ills undermine L.A.'s success, but to its credit, many other cities have the same problems, and more importantly, L.A. is currently trying to lessen or solve its problems: environmental and social.

From a more personal standpoint, I was hoping to gain some familiarity with Los Angeles by reading this book. Imagine how disappointed I was when I finished the book and went back to the foreward to the 2009 edition and found that "neither Los Angeles nor Banham read now as they did in the 1970's, or even in the 1990's." Nonetheless, in order to see L.A. the way he did, Banham had to adopt an approach to urban analysis that was different from his peers of the time. Anthony Vidler described Banham as "challenging his field of inquiry" and "attempting, sepcifically in Los Angeles, to reinvent how architectural and urban inquiry might proceed anew." Where some see kitsch, Banham sees architecture in the vein of pop art. Where some see bogged-down traffic, he sees a freedom of mobility. Where others see dull cubes, he sees efficient and simply elegant architecture fitting its warm climate. For this reinvented approach--or even for having the courage to take such a different approach--Banham's book is worthy of study by planners and designers.