Scenes in America Deserta

Reyner Banham

ISBN 10: 0500272786 / ISBN 13: 9780500272787

Published by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1984

About this Item

Wraps are firm, text block clean, without highlights/underlining or markings. Some rubbing/curling to wraps. Very clean, nearly like new. Supporting Bay Area Friends of the Library since 2010. Well packaged and promptly shipped.

Seller Inventory # BAY_16_SH_060942

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Scenes in America Deserta
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd
• Publication Date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0500272786
• ISBN 13: 9780500272787
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

In Scenes in America Deserta , Reyner Banham steps aside from his familiar role as an architectural historian and confesses himself a delighted, intrigued, but puzzled visitor to the arid lands of the American Southwest.What delights Banham most is visual pleasure, and this book is first and foremost a celebration of the pure visual response of a four-wheeled voyeur. What intrigues him is the works of man - the ancient pueblos and the modern observatories, the fantasies of Las Vegas and the Spanish missions, Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri.What puzzles him is his response as the archetypal British tourist - the discovery that the desert is beautiful in his eyes in a way that no other landscape has ever been. This unsettling discovery sends Banham on a search for the roots of this response. He seeks explanations in the works of writers is various as Gaston Bachelard, Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury early historians and explorers, the American solitary and aesthete John van Dyke (author of the classic The Desert , and Charles Doughty the English Arabist (author of Travels in Arabia Deserta ).