Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles

Text - Permalink

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles

In this 1972 BBC Films production, architectural historian Reyner Banham takes the viewer on a tour of what he describes as the “four ecologies” of the city of Los Angeles: Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia (beach, basin, foothills, freeways). Noted for his seminal book of essays, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, published the year before, Banham had a love affair with the City of Angels and its bold typologies. An Englishman in L.A., Banham exudes an almost giddy enthusiasm for the energy of the highway and celebrates qualities of the city often derided by critics of architecture and urbanism.

Banham stated “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive to read Los Angeles in the original.” Driving in traffic on highway overpasses become an opportunity for unique bird-like perspectives on the city below, unavailable to the pedestrian, and vernacular architectural design is celebrated for its storybook qualities instead of derided or dismissed as trite. The combination of his formal eye and knowledge of cities as a historian combined with an infectious, optimistic enthusiasm for the kinetic, jazz-like qualities of the messy, sprawling glory of L.A. makes for an entertaining film and a captured moment in time in the history of the city.