Historian of the Immediate Future: Reyner Banham by Nigel Whiteley

Review by: Romy Golan

The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), pp. 401-405
Published by: College Art Association
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casso? On what pictorial grounds does she
agree that critics after the war "were correct
in pointing with disfavor to a paralysis in Siro-
ni's official works" of the 1930s (p. 208)? Art
history needs to develop different criteria of
interpretation for these works based on how
they look, rather than the degree to which
they conform to our modernist models of
"critique" versus "consensus." We need more
sustained comparisons between works like
Guernica and Fascist Work,and between these
works and the surrounding visual culture,
both high and low.
In her epilogue, Braun briefly compares
Sironi's postwar paintings-remarkable
picto-
graphic works that she illustrates but does not
discuss-to American Abstract Expression-
ism, suggesting that both exploited a univer-
salizing language of primitive myth to protest
"contemporary materialist values and exces-
sive individualism" (p. 214). Abstract Expres-
sionism crops up in Cone's narrative of
French art under Vichy as well, in her account
of the ideological uses that can be made of
abstraction, and as we have seen, Utley's final
chapter judges the failure of Picasso's late
figurative work by the standard of Abstract
Expressionism's achievement. It is striking
that three works of art history that are self-
consciously revisionist in their insistence on
addressing previously disregarded works of
modern art are all drawn to Abstract Expres-
sionism as a model of modernism that can-
not, on some level, be avoided. The Cold War
models are tenacious, and the modernist art
history that will "blast holes in established
interpretations of the twentieth century" has
not yet fully arrived.
CHRISTINA KIAER is associate professor of art
history and archaeology at Columbia University,
where she teaches modern art [Department of Art
History and Archaeology, Columbia University,
New York,N.Y. 10027].
Notes
1. Exhibitions include Artand Power:Europeunder
the Dictatorsat the Hayward Gallery, London, in
1995, and TheAesthetic Arsenal:SocialistRealismunder
Stalinat P.S. 1 in New Yorkin 1993. For a reviewof
the current scholarship on Fascist art, see Mark
Antliff, "Fascism,Modernism, and Modernity,"Art
Bulletin84 (2002): 148-69. On Soviet Socialist Re-
alism, see the recent work of Susan E. Reid, for
example, "SocialistRealism in the Stalinist Terror:
The Industryof SocialismArt Exhibition, 1935-41,"
RussianReview60, no. 2 (Apr. 2001): 153-84.
2. See Susan Buck-Morss,TheDialecticsof Seeing:
Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge,
Mass.:MIT Press, 1989).
3. Suprematism's difference from or critique of
Bolshevikstate building has also been suggested by
T.J. Clarkin Farewellto an Idea: Episodesfrom a History
of Modernism(London: Yale UniversityPress, 1999),
chap. 5, "GodIs Not CastDown,"whose publication
intersected with that of Buck-Morss'sbook.
4. See ChristinaKiaer,ImagineNo Possessions:The
Socialist Objectsof Russian Constructivism (forthcom-
ing).
5. See Michele C. Cone, ArtistsunderVichy:A Case
of Prejudiceand Persecution(Princeton: Princeton
UniversityPress, 1992).
6. See Peter Bfirger, Theoryof the Avant-Garde,
BOOK REVIEWS 401
trans. Michael Shaw,ed. Wlad Godzich and Jochen taken an easier route by simply gathering
Schulte-Sasse,Theory and Historyof Literature,vol. some of Banham's pieces and adding little
4 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
critical apparatus. Whiteley is the first scholar
1984).
of a younger generation to write on Banham
7. See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism:
Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. from an analytic point of view, relying on
Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University archival and secondhand anecdotal informa-
Press, 1992). tion for his account. He does not offer a
8. Benjamin Buchloh, "FromFakturato Factogra- biography (although we learn that one is in
phy," October30(1984): 83-119. the making). It thus begins not with Ban-
ham's childhood, immersed, as Banham
loved to boast, in popular culture in provin-
NIGEL WHITELEY cial Norfolk, nor with his still somewhat ob-
Historian of the ImmediateFuture: scure war years as an aeronautics engineer,
Banham but with Banham the scholar and the writer.
Reyner And yet this book has the warmheartedness of
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 494
a labor of love. It clearly aims not only to take
pp.; 89 b/w ills. $39.95 us, at a leisurely pace, through Banham's writ-
ings, but also to secure Banham his rightful
As anyone who has had anything to say about place as a major figure in contemporary cul-
Reyner Banham will agree, it is impossible not ture.
to fall under the spell of the wit and the Whiteley's was not an easy task. It is partic-
intelligence of the writing. Banham is one of ularly hard to write about a man whose every
the best reads, ever, on architecture. Yet at quote is a gem and who always aimed to write
the same time few have shared his fixation intensely in the present tense, sucking his
with technology. This fixation prevented him reader into the here and now even when he
from recognizing architecture in its manifold wrote about things of the past. To character-
and often contradictory dimensions. Most sig- ize Banham's thought is to feel that one is
nificantly, in his repeated attacks against the merely paraphrasing in a minor key. It was
aestheticization of the machine in the hands also impossible for Whiteley to give us a real
of the modern movement, Banham refused sense of the extraordinary range not only of
to accept the inevitable play between the sym- Banham's eight or so books on architecture
bolic and the literal in architecture. He re- but also of the more than seven hundred
jected the idea that because architecture is a articles he wrote, often on a weekly basis, for
language of a different nature from technol- at least ten different journals, touching on
ogy, it is impossible for architects to remain every topic from what he called "car styling"
welded to the field of applied technology to drag races, clip-on devices ("gizmology"),
without sliding, in order to signify at the level sci-fi, and films like Star Wars. 'You need," as
of culture, into metaphor.' Banham culti- Banham once said about a building he was
vated this inflexible attitude in the same way describing, "to keep your eyes peeled and
that he cultivated his frank, engaging voice. It your wits about you" to even attempt to con-
is this voice that made him the most polemi- vey the richness of articles with such titles as
cal among his peers-Alan Colquhoun, Colin "The Architecture of Wampanoag," "Art-
Rowe, Bruno Zevi, Vincent Scully, Robert Space Angst," "The Bauhaus Gospel," "Drop-
Venturi-all of whom set out to rewrite the out Dottiness," "Household Godjets [sic],"
stultified master narrative of the modern "Kandy Kulture Kikerone," "Softer Hard-
movement as told by the triumvirate of grand- ware," and "Summa Galactica," some of
style architectural historians Nikolaus Pevs- which, like "The Great Gizmo" and "Brico-
ner, Siegfried Giedion, and Henry-Russel logues a la lanterne," read as real tours de
Hitchcock. force of the histoiredes mentalitis.Yet, as White-
Nigel Whiteley writes admirably about Ban- ley recognized, it is also precisely Banham's
ham's ins and outs with academe. All his life constant "with-it-ness" that risks dating him,
Banham maintained, especially after he had marking him as a perennially youthful bohe-
become a university professor in England and mian intellectual of the 1960s.
later in the United States, an outsider's per- A design historian, Whiteley is at his best
sona. Banham once described the maverick when he analyzes Banham's views on design
architect and engineer Buckminster Fuller- and pop culture. Banham was extraordinarily
one of his all-time favorite figures, the other conversant with the professional side of de-
the Futurist Tommaso Mari-
being Filippo sign, both in England, Italy, and the United
netti-as a "footloose intellectual freeboo-
States, and was an enthusiast of automobile
ter," and this is clearly the way he viewed design. Whiteley expertly takes us through
himself. Banham also probably would have this passionate side of his life. He also gives us
liked to be described as the smartest engineer a striking account of Banham's position vis-
to have written on architecture. a-vis his symbolic father and son-his famous
This is the first book that aims to examine teacher Nikolaus Pevsner and his most fa-
the entirety of Banham's output. Earlier texts mous student, Charles Jencks-partly thanks
on Banham were mostly reviews of his books, to Banham's own candid and often humorous
written by peers in the heat of the moment. published account of both relations. He does
Two previous anthologies-Design by Choice, less well in situating Banham among his pro-
edited by Penny Sparke (1981), and A Critic fessional peers Colquhoun, Rowe, Zevi,
Writes (1996), edited by his wife, Mary Ban- Scully, and Venturi. Whiteley, insofar as he
ham, and two figures from Banham's inner neglects this context, is in a sense all too loyal
circle, Cedric Price and Paul Barker-had to Banham, since this lack of context rein-
 ART BULLETIN 2003 VOLUME LXXXV
402 JUNE
forces Banham's own view of himself as an
outsider. But it hinders our own efforts to
evaluate the originality of Banham's contribu-
tion.
Like other recent academic books on the
1960s and 1970s, Whiteley's account suffers,
despite its attempt to step back from the writ-
ings, from a lack of historical perspective. It is
not that Whiteley is uncritical of his subject.
He lucidly points to Banham's self-delusion in
thinking that he could stand beyond ideology
and write, as he would say, "an almost value-
free" history of architecture just by keeping
his eyes fixed on technology. Purporting to be
nonideological is itself an ideological posi-
tion. Whiteley is also plainly aware of how
difficult it must have been for Banham, who
had managed to circumvent a midlife crisis by
embracing the youthful group Archigram in
the late 1960s, to relinquish his position as
enfant terrible in the history of architecture.
For, as he shows, Banham suddenly found
himself, not even five years after the events of
1968, in a position dangerously close to that
of the puritanical older-generation modern-
ists, the position he had set out to overturn.
His optimistic pronouncements about tech-
nology, which sounded so radical in the
1960s, rang as puerile and irresponsible in
the face of the energy crisis and the interest
in ecology in the early 1970s. And his re-
peated attacks against postmodernism in the
1980s, to which Whiteley dedicates more than
a chapter, inevitably made him sound defen-
sive.
Yet I think we need by now to take a step
further back in order to assess the historical
reasons for Banham's singularity. I would ar-
gue that it was only a Briton, and only a
Briton of his generation, and only a young
man trained to serve in World War II as an
engineer, and only a man who did not decide
until later to study architecture history with a
German emigre, in a place as cozy and at the
same time as stuffy as London's Courtauld
Institute must have been in the 1950s who
could have come to occupy the position Ban-
ham did in the discipline of architecture his-
tory: a position where he could say what he
said about the shortcomings and self-delu-
sions of the great heroes of the modern move-
ment with such impudence. It is furthermore
only somebody with an extraordinary gift not
just with language but specifically with the
English language, arguably the only idiom
truly in synchrony with industrialized popular
culture (and the language that allowed Ban-
ham smooth passage to the United States),
who could have come to occupy the discursive
position Banham did in the discipline of ar-
chitecture history.
Because they had only incompletely partic-
ipated in the so-called historical avant-garde,
the English were able, in the 1950s, to draw
with a unique freshness and a unique edge on
that avant-garde. Having held the moral high
ground in Europe in the aftermath of World
War II, the English thus found it possible to
depoliticize that avant-garde, not via formal-
ism, as they had during the first half of the
century, but in an antiformalist and anti-elitist
manner. This new avant-gardism was, how-
NUMBER 2
ever, the territory of artists and not of archi-
tects in postwar England. This distinction is
cardinal if one wants to understand Banham.
Banham, even while writing a historiographi-
cally ambitious doctoral dissertation inside
that stronghold of art history, the Courtauld
Institute, belonged to the London-based In-
dependent Group, the most avant-garde
movement going, one that had no equivalent
in either Europe or the United States. Key to
the Independent Group-and key to Banham
for the rest of his life-were Futurism and
Dada, both of which were ignored across the
board in the postwar years. The former
smacked of fascism and the latter seemed too
painfully nihilistic. What Banham liked about
these movements-and this was precisely the
aspect that had proved so dangerous about
Futurism after Benito Mussolini's take-
over-is the way both aimed to touch every
aspect of life, as opposed to what Banham saw
as the artistic reduction of Cubism. Marinetti
also gave Banham the prose stylist an irresist-
ible model for an exhilarated and iconoclas-
tic way of writing. Early essays like "Ungrab
That Gondola!" "Primitives of a Mechanized
Art," and "Neo-Liberty: The Italian Retreat
from Modern Architecture" may be read al-
most as pastiches of Marinetti's manifestos.
The Independent Group, although, as
Whiteley rightly states, an "all-inclusive"
movement, initially had very little to do with
architecture. In fact, its drive toward the dis-
solution of the distinctions between the media
went against the very concept of architecture
as a monumental, autonomous, constructed
space. Banham's lifelong bent for things that
functioned as a tease to architecture can be
found in his celebration of portable gadgetry
in "The Great Gizmo," in his focus on infra-
structure over structure in The Architectureof
the Well-TemperedEnvironment, and finally in
the virtual disappearance of architecture into
the sands of the Mojave Desert in his last
book, ScenesofAmerica Deserta.It can be found
in nuce in his review of the exhibition This Is
Tomorrowof 1956, where he wrote:
The idea of synthesis is something the Pi-
oneers of the Modern Movement inher-
ited from the Academies and passed onto
the Masters. When the theme was young, it
was simple. Painting was going to lie down
with Sculpture, and Architecture was to lie
on top of them. But in passing from hand
to hand, the theme has begun to split at
the seams, some of the stuffing has come
out, bats and bugs have got in, and it is by
no means certain that architecture is still
top dog, or that what sculptors and paint-
ers produce is necessarily painting or
sculpture.2
Nonetheless, the Independent Group counted
among its members Alison and Peter Smith-
son, and the movement claimed an architec-
tural offspring, New Brutalism, the brainchild
of Banham. By using the daunting term New
Brutalism Banham meant to discredit the
other new "isms"-New Humanism, New Em-
piricism, New Picturesque-that had happily
sprung up in the aftermath of the war in
England, embraced by an older generation in
search of either redemption or a cure for the
trauma of recent history. New Brutalismsaw
itself, through its antihumanism, as the first
real break not only with the consoling ethics
of the postwaryears but also with the puritan
ethics of the modern movement. Formally,it
stood for a helter-skelter, impure approach
against both the gentle vernacular espoused
by the New Empiricistsand the purism of the
International Style. It is easy to see how Ban-
ham became an early enthusiast of Frank
Gehry twentyyears later.
The singularabilityof the English to reread
the first historical avant-garde radically was
what Philip Johnson had in mind when, in
just two words, he commented on the Smith-
sons' mastering of the "Miesvernacular"in
their school at Hunstanton in Norfolk in
1954. What sounded like an oxymoron, in
view of LudwigMies van der Rohe's famously
stripped-down minimalist vocabulary, was
precisely the Smithsons' feat. The building
became the linchpin of what Banham called
New Brutalism.This was a building whose raw
masonry, raw concrete, unpainted walls, and
electric and heating appliances were all spec-
tacularly exposed and for all that remained
strikinglysimple and enigmatic.
Banham's intolerance for the slightest hint
of romanticismis nowhere more evident than
in his dismissiveaccount of what would have
appeared to any contemporary (and has been
recently celebrated on the pages of the jour-
nals October and GreyRoom)as one of the most
daring instances of a derelict vernacular:the
Smithsons'PatioandPavilionat the exhibition
ThisIs Tomorrow. This was an aluminum, ply-
wood, and corrugated-plasticshed decorated
with a grisly paper collage and urban junk.
The structurecan be best described as a wryly
ironic postatomic shelter at the height of the
Cold War and read as a parody of the ur-
shelters that occasionally pop up in the his-
tory of high modernism, such as Le Corbu-
sier's primitivehut in his book Unemaisonun
palais (1928) and AlvarAalto's Forest Pavilion
of 1938, as well as a satire on the eternally
British "Home Sweet Home" style being re-
vived in England by the proponents of the
New Picturesque. Banham, however, read Pa-
tio and Pavilion as an instance of New Brutal-
ism's submission to traditional values. He pre-
ferred the more futuristic pavilions in the
show. The response to Banham's criticism was
given by the Smithsons themselves with their
aeronautic, capsulelike House of the Future at
the Ideal Home exhibition in London just a few
months later.
The one thing Banham shared with Pevs-
ner, as Whiteley posits from the outset, was a
fierce opposition to historicism, which they
both found rampant in the work of young
architects in the 1950s. They saw it not only in
the Italian "Stile Neo-Liberty," with its bour-
geois revival of 19th-century Barocchetto, or
the Victorian revival in England, or even in
what Pevsner disparagingly coined the "neo-
Perret" in the work of Ed Stone or the "neo-
German Expressionism" in the work of
Claude Parent but, more perceptively, in what
they spotted as the "never-before-imitated

styles" of a modern movement revivalism:
what they called the "neo-De Stijl" or the
"neo-school of Amsterdam" practiced by
young architects such as Oscar Niemeyer at
Brasilia and by James Stirling and James
Gowan at Ham Commons.4 But more than
Pevsner, and more than any of his peers,
Banham was equally unforgiving of the
grand, narcissistic retrenchments of Le Cor-
busier, Mies, and Walter Gropius in their late
works. Ronchamp, according to Banham, was
a conscious revival of Antonio Gaudi and of
early Erich Mendelsohn, and the late archi-
tecture of Mies and Gropius a distillation of
the most academic aspects of their own works
at the time of the modern movement.
Banham's essays in Architectural Review in
the late 1950s afford a remarkable instance of
cultivation of disagreement in the pages of a
magazine. They were to form the core of his
first book, the one that is still considered his
magnum opus, Theory and Design of the First
Machine Age of 1960. Whiteley reexamines in
detail Banham's exposure of one of the great
myths of the modern movement: functional-
ism. Banham found in the machine aesthetic
merely a symbolic rather than a technological
approach to the machine. He deplored Le
Corbusier's approach to technology, which
he thought disingenuous and amateurish.
The International Style that Gropius and
Mies brought to the United States only accen-
tuated the puritanical, aestheticizing ap-
proach to technology. Banham retrieved in
his book not only Futurism but also German
Expressionist architecture, both of which Pevs-
ner had felt the need to suppress in his 1936
Pioneers of Modern Design as too romantic, too
irrational, and thus dangerously prone to fas-
cist tendencies. Banham's antipathy to rather
than fear of metaphor made it possible for
him to embrace glass architecture and simply
reject the cryptoreligious symbolism of the
Alpine crystalline imagery of Bruno Taut and
Paul Scheerbert. Meanwhile, his resolute de-
sire to push his favorites forward at the ex-
pense of others allowed him to accuse Le
Corbusier of having remained in his heart of
hearts an unreconstructed Beaux-Arts archi-
tect while passing over in silence the Beaux-
Arts elements in Antonio Sant' Elia's Futurist
monumental cityscapes. While the United
States plays almost no role in the story told in
Theoryand Design, except for one or two pages
on Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on the
Dutch, Banham's account ends in this book
with a big bang meant to delegitimize almost
everything that came before it-namely,
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, the
house that would make Le Corbusier's and
Gropius's exactly contemporary buildings
look suddenly obsolete. Le Corbusier's pseu-
dofunctionalist slogan "a house is a machine
for living in" did not forgo anything from the
past, Banham argued, because it presupposed
a bourgeois household where, according to
the expression, "on vit par 6tage" (that is, the
servants continued to occupy separate quar-
ters).
Whiteley overlooks another way in which
Banham's Theoryand Design was a critique of
the master narrative of modern architecture.
It was geared against Pevsner's Hegelianism,
that teleological unfolding in Pioneers of Mod-
ern Design that had proclaimed the machine
aesthetic as the one and only possible style-
"The Style"-for the modern age. Unlike pre-
vious accounts of the modern movement, The-
ory and Design was arranged geographically,
signaling a desire on Banham's part to derail
the synchronism of the Hegelian worldview
with a touch of the diachronic. It also allowed
him to displace the received gospel of France
and Germany's absolute centrality with an
alternative pair: Italy and the United States as
the true sites of the modern. Anti-Hegelian-
ism was very much the mark of Banham's
generation, articulated most forcefully not far
from the Courtauld, at the Warburg Institute,
by Ernst Gombrich, a man of Pevsner's gen-
eration and, like Pevsner, an emigre who had
come to England fleeing Nazism. Gombrich
dismissed entirely the notion of Zeitgeist in
favor of a trial-and-error model for image
making. Banham left unresolved the question
of how to continue to believe in the concept
of Zeitgeist in the sense of an age's truth to
itself-for example, an industrial age of the
19th century followed by a first and then by a
second machine age-while getting rid of the
overdetermination of the Hegelian sweep.5
Like Gombrich, Banham, however, found a
way out of totalizing German philosophical
schemes in the spirit of British pragmatism
and with the help of the neo-pragmatist Karl
Popper. The posthumanist objectivity that
Gombrich discovered in science Banham lo-
cated in technology. And although they did it
in very different ways, both Gombrich and
Banham gained relief from neo-Kantian
metaphysics in the here and now of popular
culture.
Banham adopted, as did the Independent
Group, an affirmative position vis-a-vis capital-
ist mass culture, something Colin Rowe and
Manfredo Tafuri never forgave him for. As
Whiteley makes clear, in one of the best parts
of the book, what Banham liked and under-
stood about design were two things, both of
them adamantly pragmatic: its professional-
ism, which he compared to that of engineers
and saw as a model for architects, and its
recognition of the concept of expendability.
Whiteley expertly situates Banham in the con-
text of the debate for and against high con-
sumption, expendability, and obsolescence
waged in the United States by sociologists
such as J. G. Lippincott in Design for Business
(1947) and Vance Packard in The Hidden Per-
suaders (1957) and The Waste-Makers(1960)
and in American publications such as Indus-
trial Design. And Whiteley is adamant, if a bit
too brief, on the difference between Ban-
ham's attitude and that of many of his now
famous theoretical peers. Banham had pa-
tience neither for the elitist, puritanical, and
paranoid arguments against mass culture
emerging no longer out of Weimar Germany
but now from Cold War America in the writ-
ings of Theodor Adorno and Clement Green-
berg nor for the romancing of folk culture
prevalent among the British neo-Marxist Left
after the war. Banham argued that industrial
consumers, far from being manipulated by
BOOK 403
REVIEWS
mass culture, were perfectly capable of dis-
cerning, deciphering, and even enjoying the
forest of signs. While Roland Barthes reveled,
in his Mythologies of 1957, in spinning ever
further the metaphors that underlay adver-
tisement, only to better dismantle its cunning
ideological mechanisms in the book's last
chapter, Banham shunned metaphor alto-
gether. He focused, so to speak, on the prag-
matics of the signifier rather than on the
vicissitudes of the signified. He shared Mar-
shall McLuhan's optimism about new media
technology but distanced himself from McLu-
han's speculative mode of thinking. Here
Banham's anti-Hegelianism and anti-academ-
icism flared up again. The demotic word "styl-
ing" might just as well replace, Banham im-
plies, the notion of style. Nothing could be
more anti-Hegelian than this fleeting ap-
proach to Zeitgeist and nothing more trans-
gressive when carried over to the field of ar-
chitecture. Banham saw Le Corbusier as
guilty of not having followed his own best
advice, to treat architecture as expendable
equipment, according to one of his own fa-
mous sayings: "we have no right to waste our
strength on worn-out tackle, we must scrap,
and re-equip."
And for those art historians like myself who
may wonder whether Banham's attraction to
car styling, the most iconic and figural branch
of industrial design in the 1950s and 1960s,
might not have been motivated by its icono-
graphic potential, suffice it to compare an
essay like Banham's "Vehicles of Desire" to
Richard Hamilton's long-winded and self-evi-
dent iconographic interpretations of car de-
sign as the basis for his paintings, taking Er-
win Panofsky as his model. Banham never fell
into this kind of academic exercise. His arti-
cle "Notes towards a Definition of U.S. Auto-
mobile Painting as a Significant Branch of
Mobile Modern Heraldry" in Art in America
(1966), which might have turned out to be a
case study in the well-known English pen-
chant for narrative, remained a matter-of-fact
account of drag-racing visuals without any at-
tempt at exegesis.
Although Banham found a second, eu-
phoric youth in the utopianism of the group
Archigram, whose members celebrated him
both as mentor and fellow traveler, he simi-
larly never gave in to the sci-fi, cartoonlike,
iconographic bent of their projects. He
praised the wealth of graphic detail of Archi-
gram's Walking City, as if detail were the evi-
dence of practicality, but remained focused
on the more fundamental concepts that un-
derlay such projects: a clip-on architecture,
with megastructures made of separate parts, a
ludic approach to urbanism, and nomadism.
His most ardent defenses and his most beau-
tiful descriptions of buildings were devoted in
the 1960s and 1970s not to Archigram's ar-
chitecture on paper, or even Cedric Price's
Fun Palace project, but to the elegant, high-
tech, extensively glazed corporate headquar-
ters and university buildings by Norman Fos-
ter and Stirling and to Renzo Piano and
Richard Roger's megamuseum-cum-library on
the Plateau Beaubourg in Paris. It was they,
offering what Banham called "the style for the
 404 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2003 VOLUME LXXXV NUMBER 2

job," who were the true heirs of the Futurists wild and autonomous, without the built enve- the firm ideas expounded in TheoryandDesign
and the German Expressionistglass architec- lope: Las Vegas. and The New Brutalism, politically short-
ture. Whereas Theoryand Design had an oedipal sighted, and economically irresponsible in
Banham's most radical book to my mind stamp, The Architectureof the Well-TemperedEn- their belief in the rationalismof technology.6
was not Theory and Design, the one Banham vironment wasa book without fathers. Banham A ConcreteAtlantis: U.S. Industrial Building
book every architect claims to have read in attached to it the skimpiest of bibliographies: and European Architecture 1900-1925, written
college, nor his second-best-knownbook, the no more than three items. The reluctant tone in the early 1970s after Banham's permanent
one on Los Angeles, but The Architectureof the of his acknowledgment to Giedion's Mechani- move to the United States, where he had
Well-Tempered Environment. Published, in zation Takes Command (1948) is equally telling. gotten a job at the State University of New
timely fashion, at the tail end of the student For while it was certainlydaring of Giedion to York at Buffalo, linked back to one of his
movement in 1969, the book is predicated on write a history of domestic appliances, his earlier obsessions, the modern movement's
a true paradigm shift that has since become storyremained separatefrom that of architec- fetishizationof technology. The book retraces
the credo of every young architecture firm ture. Not a single building appears in Giedi- the story of two typologies: the American fac-
from Rotterdam to Southern California:the on's book. Banham'sbook, althoughit presents tories and grain elevatorsof the late 19th and
displacement of architecture by something engineering as "another culture,"incompati- early 20th centuries. Although Banham
else, "une architecture autre," to which Ban- ble with architecture, is very much about ar- would have denied it, the book was also a
ham gave the names technology, apparatus, chitecture. While the placing of infrastruc- melancholy, and lonely, promenade along
clip-on structures, software. Architecture is ture at the center of his account erodes the Buffalo River,among the industrialruins.
not composed of autonomous structures; received concepts of architecture at their Whiteley discusses it as a direct segue to Ban-
rather, it is the provision of fit environments core, the book still contains peerless descrip- ham's 1960s views on the machine aesthetic.
for human activities.The word "fit,"Banham tions of individual buildings. In defiance of And yet by the time the book was published,
noted, may be defined in the most generous the fashion of poststructuralisttheory sweep- posthumously, in 1986, it took part not only
terms imaginable but still does not necessarily ing architectural academic circles during in the ongoing fad for industrial archaeology
imply the erection of buildings. Whiteley is those years, Banham offered a pragmatic ex- but also in the whole question-antipathetic
right to invoke Rosalind Krauss'simportant perience of architecture, not one via theory. to Banham-of lieuxde mWmoire. The fact that
essay "Sculpture in the 'Expanded Field'"' Los Angeles: The Architectureof Four Ecologies Banham chose to begin with the banal, non-
(1979) in this context. In it, she described the (1971) continued to skim across the horizon- heroic, horizontal structure of the forgotten
new sculpture of the late 1960s, stretching tal field, predicated as it was on Banham's factories rather than with the monumental,
outward into the horizontal field, as some- claim that it was no longer possible for archi- iconic, vertical structures of the grain eleva-
thing fundamentally different from the self- tects of think of cities as collections of build- tors that so seduced Gropius, Mendelsohn,
contained monolithic forms until then recog- ings with spaces in between them. As Whiteley and Le Corbusier is symptomatic.The book
nized as being sculpture. But in Banham, this discusses,other books on Los Angeles's archi- ends, as had Theoryand Design, with a Banham
paradigm shift is pushed even further and tecture and urbanism came out at the time, favorite meant to reveal in exemplaryfashion
comes closer, I would say, to Lucy Lippard's and the American genres of the road novel, the foils of all that preceded. This time it was
influential essay "The Dematerialization of the road movie, and the road photo book had Giacomo Matt6-Trucco's Fiat factory-cum-
Art" of 1968. Whiteley races us through the been established since the 1950s. Yet Ban- rooftop racetrack, known as the Lingotto
chapters of The Architectureof the Well-Tempered ham's is by far the most radical ode to Los (1927), the only structuredemonstrating that
Environment, a book centered on sections cut Angeles, not because it gave prominence to its architect had paid attention to facts on the
awayto reveal the infrastructure,the control Pop ephemera such as the hamburgerjoints, ground: that is, that American factories had
systems of buildings. The initial chapters "driftfood"restaurants, and auto-sale estab- shifted, by the 1910s, to being horizontal
trace the development of air-conditioning, lishments but because of the book's hierar- structures. Here, Banham once more reas-
electric ducts, suspended ceilings, heated chical reversal of architecture and environ- serted the "truth-value"of the horizontal as
floors, and acoustics, celebrating their inven- ment. While four architectures form the opposed to the mythopoetics of the vertical
tors, all engineers, instead of the architects. backbone of Banham's book, the four ecolo- and the modern alliance between America
Banham's favorites in this book are William gies of the title-"surfurbia" (the beach and and Italy.
Henman and Thomas Cooper's Royal Victo- beach culture), the suburban foothills, the As betrayed as Banham said he felt about
ria Hospital in Belfast,Wright'sLarkinBuild- plains of the interior, and "autopia"(the free- Pevsner's abandonment of his prewar inter-
ing in Buffalo of 1906, and Marco Zanuso's way, whose intersections are lovingly de- nationalism in favor of the English pictur-
Olivetti factoryin Argentina of 1964. None of scribed, ignoring the trafficjams, the smog, esque in the 1950s, Banham's embrace of all
these belonged to the modernist canon. They and frustration at the wheel)-extend as things American after moving to the United
are looked at, moreover, horizontally, not as great monuments under the big California States cannot but bring to mind Pevsner's
singular, iconic buildings but as building sky. As fond as he was of Rudolf Schindler, love affair with England. Having come to
complexes, foreshadowing Banham's interest Charles and Ray Eames, Craig Ellwood, and America by choice, Banham did not experi-
in megastructures. The book then segues into the Case Study houses-those cheap, stan- ence the need, as Pevsner obviously had, to
theaters, cinemas, and hotel dining rooms, all dardized cottages put together in steel assem- ground himself by romancing the local and
public spaces geared toward full control of bly techniques doing their job "sans plus" so the vernacular. This also meant that Banham
the environment. Individual houses, which that they could boast being about "even less never entered the lineage of those who wrote
had played a major role as prototypes in the than Mies"-Banham's sections on architec- the history of American architecture by way of
history of modern architecture, significantly ture function only as foils in this book. Just as the vernacular, notably, Vincent Scully, Rob-
had a diminished place in this book. And in important to him are the "dingbat" apart- ert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, and Rob-
houses, too, Banham argued that the hard- ments and tract houses generated, like weeds, ert Stern. As Banham had made clear years
ware had to be either exposed for what it by the nearby network of the freeways. earlier in his articles for ArchitecturalReview,
was-the exemplar of which became, in Ban- The Architectureof the Well-Tempered Environ- he never supported local architectural lore
ham's subsequent writings, Pierre Chareau's ment and Los Angeles received long but luke- for the sake of the local. As he saw it, the love
1931 Maison de Verre in Paris-or made in- warm reviews a few years after their publica- of the vernacular necessarily led to nostalgia
visible by submitting to what Banham calls tion in the newly founded magazine for local materials and local modes of con-
software activity, as in Wright's Robie House Oppositions. The reviewers, Kenneth Framp- struction instead of the new materials and
and, surprisingly, as Whiteley notes, in view of ton and William Ellis respectively, held com- techniques offered by technology. His belief
Banham's opinion of Mies's followers, Philip mon reservations. Both books were seen as that Americans' frontier mentality was evi-
Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Con- disappointments, overly tendentious in their denced in their propensity for the portable
necticut. The Architecture of the Well-Tempered selective approach to the built environment, gizmo, the gadget, and the gimmick, from the
Environment ends with infrastructure gone ideologically confused in comparison with wooden house sitting loosely on the terrain

all the way to the present-daymobile camper,
obviously precluded the very concept of an
American sense of place. For all of his affec-
tion for popular culture, Banham also never
endorsed the dubious populism of what Ven-
turi loved to call "the dumb and the ordinary"
or Venturi's celebration of Main Street.While
Banham's book on Los Angeles was accused
of having passed off the status quo as a nor-
mative model, Banham never shared Ven-
turi's cynical laissez-faireattitude. And yet the
question remains as to why Banham's reputa-
tion was in many ways eclipsed by Venturi's.
Part of the answer might lie in Banham's
refusal to accept the idea of an ironic play of
signs, something that was key to Venturi. This
was already remarked on by the architectural
historian Vittorio Gregotti in the 1950s when
he spoke-in response to Banham's attacks
against "Neo-Liberty"-about the possibility
on the part of young Italian (mostly Marxist)
architects of a negative reflection, an ironic
portrait,of the decadent Italian bourgeoisie.7
This means that Banham remained funda-
mentally estranged from the mind-set of post-
modernism. Whiteley dwells for at least a
chapter on Banham's refutations of postmod-
ernism. Postmodernism stood for absolutely
everything he abhorred. Postmodernism in-
duced Banham to recapture a Marinettian
tone and to rail against both what he saw as a
return to historicism under the fig leaf of
contextualism and what he saw as an aca-
demic, cliquish deployment of French theory
in the strongholds of Ivy League universities.
One gets a glimpse of Banham's views on the
matter in a piece he wrote on a building he
loved, the glass-sheathedheadquartersof Wil-
lis, Faber and Dumas in Ipswich built by Fos-
ter in 1977.
[Its glazed hung wall] is totally detail free
and yet in its swerveand wave it is nothing
but craftsmanship, detailing, incidents,
decoration, historical value: all reflected
from the buildings on the other side of the
street. An assemblage effect, almost man-
nerist, via glass reflection, experienced as
you look and move along it. The reason
for his quick change displayof visual puns,
oxymorons, metaphors and other tropes is
that the facades are curved but the glass is
flat.8
Both Jencks's and Peter Eisenman's brands of
postmodernism are diffracted by Foster's lat-
est, super high-tech, self-regulating "polyva-
BOOK REVIEWS 405
lent" glass wall as little more than a hall of ment in a difficult environment "unfit"for
mirrors, a mirage. humans. What comes to mind of Smithson's
Whiteley ends his book by saying that we are not so much the grand, elegiac earth-
should be grateful to Banham for his sheer worksfrom that same part of the world in the
love of architecture. He ends, that is, by 1970s as the rusted pipes strewn along the
thanking Banham for being who he was, and side of the NewJersey Turnpike described in
for having produced the great body of writ- his Artforumpiece "The Monuments of Pas-
ings he did, rather than trying to assess his saic" of 1967. Right now, it might be not a
relevance now for young architects and archi- professional architect, but rather somebody
tectural historians.I would venture to say that whose work is not quite architecture, not
the relevance of Banham's blithe and funky quite design, not quite sculpture, not quite
optimism might reside right nowjust as much installation either, that might best fit the pro-
outside as inside architecture. From his days file of Banham's dream "Dymaxicrat": the art-
with the Independent Group, Banham was ist Andrea Zittel, currentlyat home in her A-Z
perhaps not so much an architect or engineer West shacks, mini-apartmentsin the form of
as an artistemanque.The dustcoverof his book cellular, compartmentalizedunits, parked, at
on Los Angeles featured A Bigger Splash, a 108 degrees Fahrenheit,in the rockydesert of
California pool painting by David Hockney, Joshua Tree in Southern California.
and the last chapter had an illustration of Ed
Ruscha's Hollywood,a silk-screenprint featur- R O MY GOLAN is associate professorof twentieth-
ing the famous hill sign. Yet I would say that century art at City University, New York [Ph.D.
the book's sensibility-its use of bland, found Program in Art History, the Graduate Center, the
black-and-white photographs-was not the City University of New York, New York, N.Y.
glitzy one of Pop, with which Banham has 10016].
been generally associated,and which was pro-
moted by his publishers, but with the subtler,
conceptual, deadpan mood of the photo
books of Ruscha, the photo-based paintings Notes
of John Baldessari,and the work of Douglas 1. See Alan Colquhoun, "TheModern Movement
Huebler produced in Los Angeles in the mid- in Architecture," BritishJournal of Aesthetics,Jan.
1960s. The mixture of the elegiac and the 1962, 59-65, reprinted in Colquhoun, Essays in
deadpan in the photographs of A Concrete Architectural ModernArchitecture
Criticism: and Histor-
Atlantisis unmistakablyreminiscent of Bernd ical Change(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981),
and Hilla Becker's contemporary photo 21-25; and Robert Maxwell,"ReynerBanham:The
Plenitude of Presence,"Architectural Review51, nos.
books of decaying industrial structuresin Eu- 6-7 (1981): 52-57.
rope and the United States, such as Anony- 2. Reyner Banham, "Not Quite Quite Architec-
mousSculptures of 1970. One might also point ture Not Quite Painting or SculptureEither,"Archi-
to the work of the young photographers in- tect'sJournal124, no. 3207 (Aug. 16, 1956): 61-62,
cluded in the exhibition New Topographics: 219.
Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the 3. Philip Johnson, introduction to "Hunstanton
Norfolk," Architectural Review116, no. 693
George Eastman House in Rochester, New School, 148-62.
in
York, 1975, a show Banham, then (1954):
teaching 4. See Nikolaus Pevsner, "Modern Architecture
in nearby Buffalo, might have seen. Finally,
and the Historian or the Return of Historicism,"
and certainly self-consciously on Banham's
RIBAJournal68, no. 6 (Apr. 1961): 230-40.
part, the photographs of derelict structuresin 5. Ernst Gombrich, In Searchof CulturalHistory
Scenes of AmericaDesertaecho the work of Rob- (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
ert Smithson. Whiteley is correct in saying 6. Kenneth Frampton,reviewof TheArchitecture of
that this is not a romantic description of the the Well-Tempered Environmentby Reyner Banham,
desert itself but, rather, of the traces and Oppositions(winter 1976-77): 86-89; and William
marks of man in that landscape: the tire Ellis, reviewof LosAngelesby Banham, Oppositions 2
tracksin the sand, the solitaryKitt Peak solar (Jan. 1974): 71-80.
7. Vittorio Gregotti, "Neo-Liberty,"in Tendenze
telescope near Tucson, the shiny power py- dell nuove
lons marching over the horizon, the Indian generazioni di architetti (Rome, 1961).
8. Reyner Banham, "Glass Above, Glass Below,"
pictograph and the antiwar graffiti, the trailer New Society, Oct. 1977, reprinted in A Critic Writes:
home parked in the middle of nowhere in the
Essays by Reyner Banham, ed. Mary Banham et al.
Mojave Desert. It is about the interrelation- (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),
ships between man, machinery, and environ- 208-11.