A Critic Writes: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham (Centennial Books) - Softcover

Banham, Reyner

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520219449 ISBN 13: 9780520219441

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings.

The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system.

Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.

About this title

About the Author

Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His many books include Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1973), Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1980), and A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (1986). Mary Banham is an artist, editor, and curator who collaborated with her husband on his books and articles. Paul Barker, for many years editor of New Society, writes and broadcasts on social, environmental, and cultural issues. Sutherland Lyall, Literary Advisor to the Banham estate, has written seven books on architecture, design, and building. Cedric Price is an internationally acclaimed architect. The editors currently live in London.

From the Back Cover

"Reyner Banham's special skill was to take objects that we otherwise might take for granted and to open our eyes and minds to their visual and cultural associates. Unlike many historians he had an 'eye' and this came through in his writings. He was also a popularizer―ahead of his time. These perspectives are every bit as relevant now as they were in the past."―Sir Norman Foster, Foster Associates

"Banham's stubborn insistence on the proper terms by which to measure the contemporary predicament reveals the depth and the breadth of his contribution to architectural history and theory. The modern, for Banham and for us, simply refuses to go away."―Anthony Vidler, author of The Architectural Uncanny

From the Inside Flap

"Reyner Banham's special skill was to take objects that we otherwise might take for granted and to open our eyes and minds to their visual and cultural associates. Unlike many historians he had an 'eye' and this came through in his writings. He was also a popularizer ahead of his time. These perspectives are every bit as relevant now as they were in the past." Sir Norman Foster, Foster Associates

"Banham's stubborn insistence on the proper terms by which to measure the contemporary predicament reveals the depth and the breadth of his contribution to architectural history and theory. The modern, for Banham and for us, simply refuses to go away." Anthony Vidler, author of The Architectural Uncanny

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Critic Writes

Essays by Reyner BanhamBy Reyner Banham

University of California Press

Copyright © 1999 Reyner Banham
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520219441
1?
Vehicles of Desire

The New Brutalists, pace-makers and phrase-makers of the Anti-Academic line-up, having delivered a smart KO to the Land-Rover some months back, have now followed it with a pop-eyed OK for the Cadillac convertible, and automobile aesthetics are back on the table for the first time since the 'Twenties. The next time an open "Caddy" wambles past you, its front chrome-hung like a pearl-roped dowager, its long top level with the ground at a steady thirty inches save where the two tail-fins cock up to carry the rear lights, reflect what a change has been wrought since the last time any architect expressed himself forcibly on the subject of the automobile.

That was in the 'Twenties when Le Corbusier confronted the Parthenon and the Bignan-Sport, and from then to the New Brutalists the Greek Doric motor-car with its upright lines, square styling, mahogany fascia and yellowing nickel trim has remained the beau ideal of world aesthetes from Chicago to Chelsea Polytechnic. So great has been the aesthetic self-aggrandisement of architects, so great the public's Ruskin-powered terror of them that when Le Corbusier spoke, no-one dared to argue, and it has been placidly assumed ever since that all artefacts should be designed architect-

Originally appeared in Art, 1 September 1955, p. 3.

wise, and that later automobiles, which deviated from the Doric norm of the 'Twenties were badly designed. But what nonsense this is. Far from being uomini universali architects are by training, aesthetics and psychological predisposition narrowly committed to the design of big permanent single structures, and their efforts are directed merely to focussing big, permanent human values on unrepeatable works of unique art.

The automobile is not big?few are even mantel-piece high?it is not permanent?the average world scrapping period has lately risen, repeat risen, to fifteen years?and they certainly are not unique. The effective time-base against which the impermanence of the automobile should be reckoned is less than even fifteen years, because the average re-sale period?the measure of social obsolescence?is only three to six years, while technical obsolescence is already acute after eight to ten years. And as to uniqueness, even relatively unpopular cars have a bigger annual output than all but the most sought-after pre-fabricated, serially-produced buildings. This is a field where the architect is rarely qualified to work, or to pass judgment, and automobiles designed by architects are notoriously old-fashioned, even where?like Walter Gropius's Adler coupis?they introduce marginal novelties such as reclining seats.

The technical history of the automobile in a free market is a rugged rat-race of detail modifications and improvements, many of them irrelevant, but any of the essential ones lethal enough to kill off a manufacturer who misses it by more than a couple of years. The "classic" automobiles whose "timeless" qualities are admired by aesthetes are nowadays the product of abnormal sales conditions?the slump-crazy market on which Citroen's traction-avant was launched was as freakish as the commercially and ideologically protected one on which Dr. Porsche launched the Volkswagen . On the open market, where competition is real, it is the cunningly-programmed minor changes that give one manufacturer an edge over another, and the aesthetics of body-styling are an integral part of the battle for margins. Under these circumstances we should be neither surprised nor shocked to find that styling runs the same way as engineering development, and in any case there can be no norms of formal composition while the automobile remains an artefact in evolution, even though particular models are stabilised.

In fact it is a great deal more than an artefact in evolution as a concept while standardised in any passing type; it is also numerous as a possession while expendable as an individual example, a vehicle of popular desire and a dream that money can just about buy. This is a situation with which no pre-industrial aesthetic ever had to cope; even Plato's side-swipe at the ceramic trade in the Philebus falls a long way short of our current interpretative needs, for the Greek pot, though numerous and standardized, had long given up evolving and was not conspicuously expendable. But we are still making do with Plato because in aesthetics, as in most other things, we still have no formulated intellectual attitudes for living in a throwaway economy. We eagerly con-

sume noisy ephemeridae, here with a bang today, gone without a whimper tomorrow?movies, beach-wear, pulp magazines, this morning's headlines and tomorrow's TV programmes?yet we insist on aesthetic and moral standards hitched to permanency, durability and perennity.

The repertoire of hooded headlamps, bumper-bombs, sporty nave-plates, ventilators, retakes, incipient tail-fins, speed-streaks and chromium spears, protruding exhaust-pipes, cineramic wind-screens?these give tone and social connotation to the body envelope; the profiling of wheel-arches, the humping of mudguards, the angling of roof-posts?these control the sense of speed; the grouping of the main masses, the quality of the main curves of the panels?these balance the sense of masculine power and feminine luxury. It is a thick ripe stream of loaded symbols?that are apt to go off in the face of those who don't know how to handle them.

The stylist knows how, because he is continually sampling the public response to dream-car prototypes, fantasy vehicles like Ford's fabulous Futura, but other people must be more careful. As the New York magazine Industrial Design said, when reviewing the 1954 cars, "The most successful company in the history of the world makes automobiles; in 1953 General Motors' sales totalled $10,028,000,000, an unheard of sum. Under the circumstances, passing judgment on a new crop of cars is like passing judgment on a Nation's soul."

But coupled with this admirable caution, Industrial Design also possesses a shame-faced, but invaluable, ability to write automobile-critique of almost Berensonian sensibility. In its pages, fenced about with routine kow-tows to the big permanent values, one will find passages like "the Buick . . . is perpetually floating on currents that are permanently built into the design. The designers put the greatest weight over the front wheels, where the engine is, which is natural enough. The heavy bumper helps to pull the weight forward; the dip in the body and the chrome spear express how the thrust is dissipated in turbulence toward the rear. Just behind the strong shoulder of the car a sturdy post lifts up the roof, which trails off like a banner in the air. The driver sits in the dead calm at the centre of all this motion?hers is a lush situation."

This is the stuff of which the aesthetics of expendability will eventually be made. It carries the sense and the dynamism of that extraordinary continuum of emotional-engineering-by-public-consent which enables the automobile industry to create vehicles of palpably fulfilled desire. Can architecture or any other Twentieth Century art claim to have done as much? and, if not, have they any real right to carp?

All right then, hypocrite lecteur, where are you now with the automobile? As an expendable, replaceable vehicle of the popular desires it clearly belongs with the other dreams that money can buy, with Galaxy, The Seven Year Itch, Rock Rattle 'n' Roll and Midweek Reveille, the world of expendable art so brilliantly characterised by Leslie Fiedler in the August issue of Encounter . The motor car is not as expendable as they are, but it clearly belongs nearer to them than to the Parthenon, and it exhibits the

same creative thumb-prints?finish, fantasy, punch, professionalism, swagger. A good job of body styling should come across like a good musical?no fussing after big, timeless abstract virtues, but maximum glitter and maximum impact.

The top body stylists?they are the anonymous heads of anonymous teams?aim to give their creations qualities of apparent speed, power, brutalism, luxury, snob-appeal, exoticism and plain common-or-garden sex. The means at their disposal are symbolic iconographies, whose ultimate power lies in their firm grounding in popular taste and the innate traditions of the product, while the actual symbols are drawn from Science Fiction, movies, earth-moving equipment, supersonic aircraft, racing cars, heraldry and certain deep-seated mental dispositions about the great outdoors and the kinship between technology and sex. Arbiter and interpreter between the industry and the consumer, the body-stylist deploys, not a farrage of meaningless ornament, as fine art critics insist, but a means of saying something of breathless, but unverbalisable, consequence to the live culture of the Technological Century.

Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520219449
• ISBN 13: 9780520219441
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 366
• Editor: Banham Mary, Lyall Sutherland, Price Cedric, Barker Paul