A Critic Writes: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham FROM THE PUBLISHER
Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham (1922-1988). Born and trained in England and a resident of the United States 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 architects 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 his appreciations of Santa Monica Pier, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
A leading British architectural critic, Banham wrote for architectural journals as well as more popular media. The more than 50 essays in this collection derive from Banham's 35-year career, from 1955 through a posthumously published work of 1990. The quality of the essays varies from a brilliant work on Frank Lloyd Wright from 1969 to a number of clichd entries in the tired, Britisher-in-Southern-California genre. Though the major sections have brief introductions, the lack of footnotes or contextualization for the essays is a major deficiency. In many instances, particularly those dealing with the influence of Italian Brutalism on British architecture in the Fifties, Banham's references are often obscure or elliptical and the personages mentioned forgotten to the average reader. Recommended only for larger academic collections with an interest in late 20th-century architecture.-Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Institution Libs., Washington D.C.
Home
