“Now I know subjective opinions can vary,” the journalist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, “but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer ...”
Three years later, Raphael’s words appeared in print again as an epigraph of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies – the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles book ever written. Ever since publication, it has shown up on lists of great books about modern cities – even those drawn up by people who consider Los Angeles anything but a great American city.
Somehow, this book that drew so much of its initial publicity with shock value (“In Praise (!) of Los Angeles”, sneered the New York Times review’s headline) has kept its relevance through the decades, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to orient themselves. But what can it teach us about the Los Angeles of today?
An architectural historian a decade into his career when he first visited, Banham knew full-well that his fellow intellectuals hated Los Angeles. How and why he himself came so avidly to appreciate it constitutes the core question of his work on the city, which culminated in this slim volume.
The “many who were ready to cast doubt on the worth of the enterprise”, he reflected in its final chapter, included a “distinguished Italian architect and his wife who, on discovering that I was writing this book, doubted that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such a project and walked away without a word further.”
The project began when Banham “brought his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion”, in the words of novelist and Bradford-born Los Angeles expat Richard Rayner. Teaching at the University of Southern California, who put him up in the Greene brothers’ architecturally worshipped Gamble House in Pasadena, “Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what he went looking for, and the way he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the way the intellectual world – and then the wider world – perceived the city.”
Not that he declared his love right there on the tarmac at LAX. “Banham initially found the city ‘incomprehensible’ – a response shared by many critics,” wrote Nigel Whiteley in the study Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future.
Banham first attempted to publicly explain this cutting-edge metropolis, saturated across its enormous space with electronic devices, synthetic chemicals and televisions, in four 1968 BBC radio talks. He told of how he came to grips with LA’s embodiment of the experimental: its experimental shape and infrastructure, the combinations of cultures it accommodated, and the experimental lifestyles to which it gave rise.
But even an appreciator like Banham had his qualms with the result. “In Los Angeles you tend to go to a particular place to do a particular thing, to another to do another thing, and finally a long way back to your home, and you’ve done 100 miles in the day,” he complained in the third talk. “The distances and the reliance on mechanical transportation leave no room for accident – even for happy accidents. You plan the day in advance, programme your activities, and forgo those random encounters with friends and strangers that are traditionally one of the rewards of city life.”
Nevertheless, to Banham this un-city-like city held out a promise: “The unique value of Los Angeles – what excites, intrigues and sometimes repels me – is that it offers radical alternatives to almost every urban concept in unquestioned currency.”
In his subsequent landmark book, Banham enumerated Los Angeles’ departures from traditional urbanism, as well as from “all the rules for ‘civilised living’ as they have been understood by the pundits of modernity”, with evident delight. It seemed to legitimise a model he had already, in a 1959 article, proposed to replace the old conception of a single dense core surrounded by a wall.
Banham foresaw “the city as scrambled egg”, its shell broken open, its business yolk mixed with its domestic white, and everything spread across the landscape, its evenness disturbed only by occasional “specialised sub-centres”. A visitor to Los Angeles today might hear the city explained in just the same way: as a network of nodes, a constellation of urban villages, an exercise in postmodern polycentrism.
Banham put another finger in the eye of traditionalists who insisted that a city should have just one strong centre with his short chapter A Note on Downtown, which opens with the words, “... because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.”
From its fetishised structures such as the Bradbury Building and Cathedral of Saint Vibiana to its brand new office towers “in their standard livery of dark glass and steel”, Banham wrote that everything “stands as an unintegrated fragment in a downtown scene that began to disintegrate long ago – out of sheer irrelevance, as far as one can see.”
The book’s contrarianism reflects the contrarianism of Los Angeles itself, which, insofar as it “performs the functions of a great city, in terms of size, cosmopolitan style, creative energy, international influence, distinctive way of life, and corporate personality [proves that] 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.”Filled with photographs and diagrams, Banham’s book on Los Angeles divides its subject up into the four “ecologies” of its subtitle: the beaches and beach towns of Surfurbia; the Foothills with their ever more elaborate and expensive residences; the utilitarian Plains of Id (“the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and boring enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West”) and the famous, then infamous, freeway system he dubbed Autopia: a “single comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind” in which Angelenos “spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives”.
Between chapters on the city’s ecologies, Banham examined the buildings found in them. Populist, stylistically promiscuous, tradition-agnostic and often deliberately impermanent, Los Angeles’ architecture has, of all the city’s elements, drawn distain the longest. “There is no reward for aesthetic virtue here, no punishment for aesthetic crime; nothing but a vast cosmic indifference,” wrote the novelist James M. Cain in 1933.
More than 40 years later, Banham saw a stylistic bounty of “Tacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled and even – in extremity – Modern Architecture.”
He discussed at length the LA building known as the “dingbat” – a “two-storey walk-up apartment-block ... built of wood and stuccoed over”, all identical at the back but cheaply, elaborately, decorated up-front, emblazoned with an aspirational name such as the Capri or the Starlet.
In defining dingbats as “the true symptom of Los Angeles’ urban id, trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living,” Banham diagnosed the central and persistent tension, then as now, between wanting to grow outward and needing to grow upward.
Banham drew out the meaning of Los Angeles’ ostensibly disposable buildings not by venerating them, nor denigrating them, but simply by seeing them as they were. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would advocate the same approach in their own urban classic, Learning from Las Vegas, published the following year: “Withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.”
Still, even appreciators of Los Angeles might take issue with this method when Banham’s non-judgmental attitude – at least toward the aesthetics of American commercial culture – starts to look like advocacy for bad taste.
Non-appreciators of Los Angeles certainly did. The painter and critic Peter Plagens, author of an 11,000-word excoriation in Artforum magazine entitled The Ecology of Evil, went so far as to label Banham’s book dangerous: “The hacks who do shopping centres, Hawaiian restaurants and savings-and-loans, the dried-up civil servants in the division of highways, and the legions of showbiz fringies will sleep a little easier and work a little harder now that their enterprises have been authenticated. In a more humane society where Banham’s doctrines would be measured against the subdividers’ rape of the land and the lead particles in little kids’ lungs, the author might be stood up against a wall and shot.”
Uncowed, Banham followed the book by starring in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 1972 television documentary that followed him through one day in the city that “makes nonsense of history and breaks all the rules”, and inspired within him “a passion that goes beyond sense or reason”. Stops on the tour included Simon Rodia’s handmade Watts Towers (a “totally self-absorbed and perfected monument”) to Los Angeles’ characteristic “fantasy of innocence” (prominently marked on all the maps in his book); the overgrown sections of the old Pacific Electric Railway’s “rusting rails that once tied the whole huge city together”; the decrepit canals and beachside bodybuilding facilities of Venice; and a Sunset Boulevard drive-in burger joint.
There, Banham asked the painter Ed Ruscha, plainspoken and painstaking observer of American urban banality, what public buildings a visitor should see. Ruscha recommended gas stations.
Banham pre-empted objections to Los Angeles’ urban form by claiming “the form matters very little”, having already written that “Los Angeles has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense”. Yet whatever it does have, he argued, has produced a fascinating, and sometimes even efficient, set of emergent urban phenomena.
“Come the day when the smog doom finally descends,” he narrated over aerial shots of Wilshire Boulevard’s double row of towers and frame-filling neighbourhoods of detached houses, “... when the traffic grinds to a halt and the private car is banned from the street, quite a lot of craftily placed citizens will be able to switch over to being pedestrians and feel no pain.”
The end of the car in Los Angeles? Bold words for the man who called Wilshire Boulevard “one of the few great streets in the world where driving is a pleasure” – after having, “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original”, learned to drive “in order to read Los Angeles in the original”.
But just as the languages heard on the streets of Los Angeles have multiplied, the language of mobility has changed there, as has much else besides. How legible would Banham, who died in 1988, now find it?
The smog – that supposed bane of the city’s postwar decades which he always downplayed – has all but vanished. The time of “apparently unlimited space” to gratify an “obsession with single-family dwellings” has given way to one of construction cranes sprouting to satisfy the new demand for high-density vertical living. They stand not just over a downtown risen miraculously from the dead, but the specialised sub-centres scattered all over greater Los Angeles.
Though the ban on private cars hasn’t come yet, no recent development astonishes any Angeleno who was there in the 1970s more than the city’s new rail transit network, which started to emerge almost 30 years after the end of the Pacific Electric. It ranks as such as a success of funding, planning and implementation (at least by the globally unimpressive American standard) that the rest of the country now looks to Los Angeles as an example of how to build public transportation and, increasingly, public space in general.
Readers might scoff at Banham calling the Los Angeles freeway network “one of the greater works of man” – but he has demonstrated more of an ability to see beyond it than many current observers of Los Angeles. “Even though it is vastly better than any other motorway system of my acquaintance,” he wrote, “it is inconceivable to Angelenos that it should not be replaced by an even better system nearer to the perfection they are always seeking.”
Banham also foresaw the rise of the self-driving car, so often mooted these days as an alternative solution to Los Angeles’ traffic woes. But cars that drive themselves (as distinct from “Baede-kar” – a then-fantastical voice navigation system dreamed up for Banham’s TV doc, that bears an uncanny resemblance to those every American driver uses today) come with problems that Banham also predicted all those years ago. “The marginal gains in efficiency through automation,” he wrote, “might be offset by the psychological deprivations caused by destroying the residual illusions of free decision and driving skill.”
Under each outwardly celebratory page of Banham’s book lies the notion of change as Los Angeles’ only constant: no matter how excitingly modern the car and the freeway, their day will come to an end; no matter how comfortably idyllic the detached house, it too must fall out of favour, or into impracticality, sooner or later.
Some of the elements that drew Banham’s attention have, after their own periods of disrepute, turned fashionable again. Even the humble dingbat has found a place in the future of the city, becoming the object of critical study and architectural competition.
Banham also saw the future of Los Angeles in other unprepossessing buildings, especially one “striking and elegantly simple” stucco box on La Cienega Boulevard. Its architect? A certain Frank Gehry, then almost unknown but now one of the most powerful influencers of the built environment in not just Los Angeles (his current high-profile project involves re-making the city’s famously dry, concrete-encased river), but other cities as well. The Toronto-born “starchitect” became his adopted hometown’s architectural emissary – just one of the myriad ways in which Los Angeles has influenced the rest of the urban world.
These days, the rest of the urban world also influences Los Angeles. No longer labouring under the delusions of total exceptionalism that prevailed in Banham’s day, it has, with its towers, trains, parks and even bike-share systems, made strides toward the “liveability” so demanded by 21st-century urbanists. It now even resembles (if faintly) New York, Boston, London, and Paris – those thoroughly planned, non-experimental cities where, Banham lamented, “warring pressure groups cannot get out of one another’s hair because they are pressed together in a sacred labyrinth of cultural monuments and real estate values”.
In its impressive bid to incorporate older metropolitan virtues and play by the rules of good urban design, modern Los Angeles ignores the possibility of becoming a similarly sacred labyrinth at its peril. Keeping Banham’s Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies on its syllabus will hopefully protect against the dire fate of losing its rule-breaking experimental urban spirit.
The engineering-trained author regarded Los Angeles as a kind of machine. Though it has come in for a badly needed overhaul of its interface in recent years, nobody has yet written a user’s manual more engaged in the city on its own terms as Banham did 45 years ago.
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