Forms of Inquiry

I’ll come right out and say it: until last night, I had never heard of the architectural critic Reyner Banham. Okay, as I read his wikipedia entry it rang some bells, but I knew very little about him. My introduction came from Michael and James, when I was caught up in their cc’d enthusiasm over Banham’s 1972 BBC documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. So, in the context of the site of this exhibition — a university architecture department — its feels right that I share this discovery with anyone else who, like me, missed the class on Banham.

Any potted life-and-work history of the full-bearded, Moulton-riding Banham given by me here would of course be falsehood and worse still, freshly copy-pasted from the Internet. So I will simply suggest that the single work of his that I have experienced first-hand is an engaging piece of 70s pop edutainment. Banham takes a sightseeing “guided tour” of the sites that he already knows have made Los Angeles an important city, architecturally and culturally.

The impact of the car on the city is an ever-present element. “I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original,” Banham says in his essay “Architecture of Four Ecologies.” In Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, he is directed by “Baede-Kar,” an imagined in-car navigation system in the guise of an 8-track tape player, named after Karl Baedeker of the pioneering 19th-century travel guides. It’s this benign force that Banham uses as a prop to rail against all he sees wrong with corporate progress, lambasting “those plastic people, in their plastic boats.” He meets locals and local buildings, from van-housed drop-outs on Venice beach to Ed Ruscha at a Sunset strip Drive-in. Much like this film was recommended to me, I recommend it to you — it reads like a good primer on the spirit of the man.

Inquiry

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles or Re: Watch this, It’s lovely