Reyner Banham Research Articles

Autopia: Notes on Banham’s Visionary Metropolis

In 1959 Reyner Banham challenged zoned urbanism by combining the Situationist psychogeographic drift with his love for Los Angeles. His essay “City as Scrambled Egg” (Banham, 1959) effectively produced a new urban image and introduced a new outlook on postwar modernization, communication, and leisure. The radicalization of contemporary life resonated in images of the city as decentralized, free, and in motion. While Le Corbusier had compared the city to an egg with demarcating zones and boundaries, Banham argued that motorization and telecommunications had long scrambled the city; “I don’t just mean in Los Angeles. A large part of the population of Europe already lives conurbatively” (Banham, 1959, p. 21). The entire region between Amsterdam and Rotterdam was already one conurbanized arena, effectively formulating an early definition of the megalopolis.Unlike CIAM’s city of the urban core with designated outskirts, thecenter was now seen to be everywhere. For Banham, this was theterrain of contemporary urbanization that needed to be understoodby holding prejudgments at bay and instead doing, what he called,“leg-work on the territory” (Banham, 1959, p. 21). But, as his ongoing fascinations with Futurism and post-war technologies revealed, this departure from modernist imagery of the city was not a disregard of modernist urban utopias but a way to rework these ideas towards a new kind of visionary; one that is less about forecasting the new and, instead, is contingent on a new optical vision of the existing city. A key site for his development of a different way of seeing the modernized urban world was the city of Los Angeles and particularly its traffic, which he called “Autopia.”

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966, 144 pp., 350 illus. Library of Congress Catalogue No. 66–30001 (no ISBN); 2nd ed., 1977. $24.95, ISBN 9780870702822 The first edition of Venturi's explosive little book, written in the period 1962–64, appeared in a new series called Papers on Modern Architecture published under the imprimatur of the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. It was preceded by a lengthy excerpt in Yale's journal of architecture, Perspecta , the year before.1 In an introduction written for the MoMA book, Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully hailed it as the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture , “one of the few basic texts of our time—one which, despite its antiheroic lack of pretension and its shift of perspective from the Champs-Elysees to Main Street, still picks up a fundamental dialogue begun in the twenties, and so connects us with the heroic generation of modern architecture once more” (16).2 Most of the initial reviewers confirmed Scully's opinion of the book's import, although they voiced reservations about Venturi's methodology, above all his neglect of questions of function and technology and his skirting of social issues. For some, precisely these omissions, along with the author's explicitly subjective point of view (“I like complexity and contradiction in architecture”), were what made his “gentle manifesto” so radical. Peter Blake, whose image of Main Street Venturi had appropriated from his own book God's Own Junkyard of two years earlier to make the opposite point, deemed Complexity and Contradiction less original. Writing in Architectural Forum , he allowed that “The history of art is bound to be retold in every generation,” but he found Venturi's notion of complexity superficial and his formal contradictions to be contrived: “‘accidentalism’ has been raised to a discipline.’”3 Among other early responses, Colin Rowe, reviewing the book in the New York Times Book Review together with Reyner Banham's The New Brutalism: Ethic …

New Brutalist Image 1949–55:<br>'atlas to a new world' or, 'trying to look at things today'

The seminal exhibition ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ (PLLA) which took place at the ICA in London in 1953 continues to capture the attention of art historians and curators through exhibition histories and curatorial studies. The exhibition is a key element in defining “discourse through images (Bilddiskurs),” a longstanding practice that nonetheless experienced significant change when it encountered the image-making properties of cameras and the means for their dissemination in the press (Flusser). This change coincided with a developing awareness of iconography and the work of the Warburg circle within the Independent Group, that equally understood this form of visual analysis in relation to emerging cybernetic theories of communication and information theory. Building on research undertaken for the Tate Britain display ‘New Brutalist Image 1949-55’ (24 Nov 2014 – 20 Sep 2015), the article argues that PLLA demonstrates how photography was put to work discursively in post-war Britain, deploying new conditions of ‘seeing’ to define a visual order brought about by the transformation of image-capture and mass reproduction technologies, by the new ubiquity of photography, and by the lure of consumer society. Accompanying unprecedented technological possibilities was a new visual sensibility – in other words, a new contemporary aesthetic - rooted in the camera’s lens and mediated through printing processes. Together, this media combination encoded a manner of communication meant to challenge the cultural and social primacy of the printed word, invoking an “Esperanto” of images. Anticipating Lawrence Alloway’s conceptualisation of a ‘fine art pop art continuum’, the article argues, that the photographic image, through its mediating and remediating qualities became a sophisticated, nuanced tool of communication across the practices of art, architecture and design. It also highlights Peter Smithson’s proposition that understanding the visual motivations behind PLLA revealed contemporary cultural conditions “like a Rosetta Stone.” The collaborative team of Alison & Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Ronald Jenkins behind ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ shared an ambition to release the expanded field of everyday day visual culture into vision and experience across the board, displacing the highly invested and ordered culture of art and architecture, one traditionally governed by elitist ideas of public value and taste. The specificity and importance of photography as both a tool of communication and a medium of visual convergence that synthesised disparate registers, has been neglected in studies of British art, leading to misrecognition and an under-conceptualised reading of the exhibitions produced by IG members, including PLLA. As Reyner Banham, the architecture critic and theorist of New Brutalism noted when reviewing PLLA, “We tend to forget that every photograph is an artifact ... the photograph being an artifact applies its own laws of artefaction to the material it documents, and discovers similarities and parallels between the documentation, even where none exists between the objects and events recorded. Thus photographs make us see connections ...” (Reyner Banham, ‘Photography’ [PLLA review], AR, 1953) For the PLLA team of ‘editors’, a body of photographic images taken by Nigel Henderson (who they mutually identified and awarded the role of photographer to act as their translator, mediator and ‘image-finder’) nonetheless reflects the experiments of the group, documenting their work and recording their visual sensibility. Through our selection and curation of images, the article will demonstrate how photography was exploited as a medium to bring disparate practices, spatial and temporal environments, social and cultural spaces together in the binding matrix of the photographic image.

“Would this be of your interest?” Los seminarios de Banham en Argentina y el debate sobre el control ambiental en 1968

<p>Las conferencias de Banham en Argentina anticiparon su libro The architecture of the well-tempered environment. Los seminarios muestran la apertura del debate entre las nociones de control climático y entorno, y aquéllas distintas que propondrá Maldonado, como ambiente humano y ecología.</p>

Excessive Resolution: From Digital Streamlining to Computational Complexity

Is the term ‘ornament’ set to become redundant in architecture? With the sinuous lines produced by CNC milling machines giving way to the ever more weirdly figural products of algorithmically controlled 3D printing, decoration is increasingly an integral part of form, rather than supplementary to it. Mario Carpo – Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London – investigates this voxellisation, and how it drives architecture beyond human comprehension.

Brutalist image as humanist form: Reyner Banham, Erwin Panofsky and the turn to spatio-temporal structures in 1950s histories of (modern) art

Brutalist image as humanist form: Reyner Banham, Erwin Panofsky and the turn to spatio-temporal structures in 1950s histories of (modern) art

Historic Preservation in an Economic Void

This article explores experimental historic preservation practices at Silo City, a cultural campus “built” around three vacant grain elevators in Buffalo, New York. Amid the not-fully-deindustrialized landscape that Reyner Banham famously called a “Concrete Atlantis,” these practices operate outside traditional adaptive reuse markets, without significant public funding, and exploit historic industrial sites in their “as is” condition. This article argues that these practices have the potential to redefine preservation as an accessible and enjoyable practice rather than a means to a historically rigorous restoration or expansive local development stimulus; and are well suited for hard-to-preserve industrial sites in declining cities.

Parametric Notations: The Birth of the Non‐Standard

The use of scripted parameters that define objects in architecture is generally regarded as a recent phenomenon, associated with digital design. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), describes how parametric notations are part of an enduring architectural lineage that has its roots in the theses of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, previous to printing, when the only means of disseminating the proportions and combining of elements was to describe them, writing them out by hand without the aid of illustration.

Review: The New Brutalist Image 1949–55 and The Brutalist Playground

The New Brutalist Image 1949–55 Tate Britain, London 24 November 2014–4 October 2015 The Brutalist Playground Royal Institute of British Architects, London 10 June–16 August 2015 Brutalism has never entirely been out of fashion since Reyner Banham published The New Brutalism in 1966, but the term has become trendy again in the past five years as most of the movement's iconic buildings in Britain have been swept away.1 When eighteen years ago I began work on my own book Space, Hope and Brutalism (published in September 2015), I did not expect to catch the crest of a wave.2 Yet what does Brutalism actually mean? Banham's book coincided with the generation of great concrete housing blocks and shopping centers, to which the label stuck. But the initial New Brutalism (the adjective is important) was a more discrete movement of architects and artists who looked at the sources of art in nature, at basic geometries, and believed in expressing building materials and structure as naturally as possible, whether in timber, brick, steel, or concrete. One can see parallels in the work of Aldo van Eyck, himself inspired by artists, and even Louis Kahn, but the term New Brutalism is wholly British—although the movement's revival has been led largely by historians from abroad. The Tate exhibition focused on collaborations among sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, photographer Nigel Henderson, engineer Ronald Jenkins, and architects Alison and Peter Smithson. While much of its content had been picked over since the major exhibition on the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1991, including a small retrospective on the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art at the ICA …

Review: This File May Be Corrupted

This File May Be Corrupted In the 1972 documentary film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles , Banham drives an automobile equipped with a fictional “Baede-Kar” visitor guidance system, a humorous “tribute to Karl Baedeker, the father of the modern guidebook,” that purportedly helps him navigate the city.1 Some forty years later we could be just one app away from self-driving cars featuring voice-activated GPS systems that not only tell us where to go but also describe the historical significance of the buildings we see along the way. More than simply being influenced by multimedia publications, architectural history has arrived at producing hypermediated experiences. From engaging media as part of architecture’s intellectual history to adapting multimedia projects to the conventions of historical research to producing spatial stories through interactive delivery systems that allow participants to construct narratives across divergent sequences, hypermediated histories may more clearly define the historian’s role as an active participant in, rather than passive observer of, the delineation of our built environment. For their pioneering conceptualization of such digital phantasmagoria I remain profoundly indebted to this journal’s previous multimedia review editors, who have argued for multimedia’s potential to augment architectural history as much as architecture. …

Architectures of deviation: exploring the spatial protocols of contemporary videogames

This essay attempts to outline the ways in which contemporary videogames produce spatial experiences, and how architects might interrogate their unique media form. Framing videogames as both computational constructions and cultural artefacts, the paper places the study in a lineage of architectural thinkers examining ‘pop-culture’ and technology. This draws from the Smithson's writings on advertisements as technical images, Venturi Scott-Brown's studies on symbolism, through to Reyner Banham's definition of mass produced gizmos. The paper first outlines the importance of videogames on society and their Smithsonian impulses towards architectural design. To support this, I examine the work of game theorists such as Espen Aarseth and Ian Bogost. Aarseth argues that game spaces sever certain ties and ‘deviate’ from reality in order to become playable spaces. Bogost contends that game rules produce ‘procedural rhetoric’ - games may advance arguments through the playing of their rules. Reading from these theories I argue that these rule-based breaks from the real are a potent site for architectural speculation.The second section comprises design case studies scrutinising existing game worlds and producing new videogames as architectural experiments. I begin by examining the significance of symbolism in videogame worlds, and how this might provide alternative trajectories for digital architectural design. I subsequently explore Atkinson and Willis’ concept of the ludodrome, slippages between virtual and real, and discuss Ubiquity, a game I produced to explore this condition. I return to Banham's Great Gizmo, alongside PW Singer's writings on military robotics, to see the gamepad as a new order of gizmo for colonising space. And I discuss ‘Grand Theft Auto V’'s loading screen as a manifestation of satellite imagery aesthetics that collapse space. The paper concludes that games are powerful media for spatial experimentation and we must prepare for new generations of designers highly influenced by such ‘deviated’ architectures.

The New Science of Form‐Searching

New technologies, by definition, change fast, as does our cultural awareness of our use of them. Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), explains how in the course of the last few years much of our discourse on new technologies has been driven by an unexpected and, in many ways, inexplicable development: the availability of almost unlimited data storage and data‐processing capabilities at ever‐decreasing ‐ and often almost negligible ‐ costs. As digitally intelligent designers and structural engineers have not failed to notice, this simple, almost banal technical development has the potential to disrupt the way we design and calculate almost everything.

Between Brutalists. The Banham Hypothesis and the Smithson Way of Life

This essay revisits the debates on the New Brutalism as it emerged in Great Britain in the early 1950s. The shifting positions of its main propagators, Alison and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham, are scrutinised through a re-reading of the polemics of the period and its aftermath. Conventionally, Banham's ground-breaking essay of 1955 ‘The New Brutalism’ is used as a starting-point for a unified history of New Brutalism. However, as it turns out, the Smithsons and Banham held very different opinions about the direction of the New Brutalist project. Whereas Banham advocated an integration between architecture and the latest technologies, the Smithsons sought to combine modern architecture with a multiplicity of tendencies within British culture, reaching back to Arts and Crafts concepts, among others. To open up the discourse and to measure the various shifts, the essay discusses the concept of ‘Image’, identified by Banham as one of the key concepts of New Brutalism, in relation to the various statements made by the Smithsons. In contrast to Banham, the Smithsons defined New Brutalism by laying emphasis on the material qualities of architecture and the aspects of process and making in architectural construction. This was related to their ambition to redesign the system of relationships between the everyday, domesticity, labour and the larger society. In short, it was a different ‘way of life’ that was behind the Smithsons' project for New Brutalism.

From tradition to innovation: Lewerentz's designs of ritual spaces in Sweden, 1914–1966

Sigurd Lewerentz's architectural production throughout the twentieth century set a course for subsequent developments in Sweden, and the various monographs and analyses featuring his work to date reveal his lasting influence on international architectural discourse. Reyner Banham included Lewerentz in his book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?. While his British Brutalist counterparts explored everyday life after the 1950s, Lewerentz's connection with popular culture was strongly tied to tradition. This paper analyses how Lewerentz's study of traditional construction methods affected his design of ritual spaces from 1914 to 1966, and explores his statements about tradition as compared with his built projects. His initial years reflect his adhesion to tradition, as a reaction to some of the existing practices in Sweden. After 1940, Lewerentz sought to reassess existing models and in his last projects referred to heritage as a basis for innovation and for interpreting traditional construction elements in novel ways. Lewerentz's shifting regard for tradition defines a novel framework in which to consider his extensive production in an all-inclusive way. His use of tradition as a resource to produce novel designs provides a lens through which to examine innovation, establishing continuity with existing designs.

Reyner Banham and Aldo Rossi. Two Possible Urban Images of the “Second Machine Age”

Reyner Banham and Aldo Rossi. Two Possible Urban Images of the “Second Machine Age”

Vulgar Modernism: J. M. Richards, Modernism and the Vernacular in British Architecture

In 1946 J. M. Richards, editor of theArchitectural Review (AR)and self-proclaimed champion of modernism, published a book entitledThe Castles on the Ground(Fig. 1). This book, written while working for the Ministry of Information (Mol) in Cairo during the war, was a study of British suburban architecture and contained long, romantic descriptions of the suburban house and garden. Richards described the suburb as a place in which ‘everything is in its place’ and where ‘the abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away’. For this reasonThe Castles on the Groundis most often remembered as a retreat from pre-war modernism, into nostalgia for mock-Tudor houses and privet hedges. The writer and critic Reyner Banham, who worked with Richards at the AR in the 1950s, described the book as a ‘blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’. More recently, however, it has been rediscovered and reassessed for its contribution to mid-twentieth-century debates about the relationship between modern architects and the British public. These reassessments get closer to Richards’s original aim for the book. He was not concerned with the style of suburban architecture for its own sake, but with the question of why the style was so popular and what it meant for the role of modern architects in Britain and their relationship to the ‘man in the street’.

Review: Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990

Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 Getty Center Exhibitions Pavilion, Los Angeles 9 April–21 July 2013 National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. 20 October 2013–10 March 2014 Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 was an ambitious exhibition that drew on an earlier initiative by the Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, chronicling the transformation of Los Angeles from a “fledgling pueblo in the mid-1800s to a vibrant urban center” in the mid-twentieth century. There has not been any major exhibition on Southern California’s architecture and urbanism since Architecture in California, 1868–1968 , the groundbreaking retrospective curated by David Gebhard and Harriette Von Breton in 1968. Thus, Overdrive shouldered a huge burden of expectation. Los Angeles, America’s second-largest city, has not been as lucky as the Big Apple. When we think of a quintessential twentieth-century American city that embodies exuberant architectural visions for the future and provides a dynamic urban theater for Horatio Alger–type “rags-to-riches” stories, we unconsciously conjure up images of New York. Despite L.A.’s claim of being “one of the most populous and influential industrial, economic, and creative capitals in the world” and its iconic image popularized by the celluloid glamour of Hollywood, the city’s architectural and urban histories have remained relatively understudied, compared to other global cities such as London, Paris, and New York. This, of course, does not mean that there has been a dearth of worthwhile architectural and urban happenings in L.A. Among other books, David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s A Guide to Architecture in Southern California (1965); Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971); Charles Moore, Peter Becker, and Regula Campbell’s The City Observed, Los Angeles: A Guide to Its Architecture and Landscapes (1984); and Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: Excavating …

La casa de Norman y Wendy Foster en Hampstead

Entre 1978 y 1979, Norman y Wendy Foster proyectan su propia vivienda en el barrio londinense de Hampstead. El proyecto más personal de los Foster permite —como en tantos otros casos— rastrear los referentes, obsesiones, sueños y frustraciones de sus autores.Este proyecto representa el primer y único intento de aplicación en el campo de la arquitectura doméstica de un modelo, denominado por Reyner Banham “la nave bien servida”, que utiliza la integración de sistemas como principal estrategia proyectual.Los 18 meses de intenso trabajo reflejan, a través de las múltiples opciones desarrolladas, la evolución de la obra de la pareja de arquitectos, que avanza desde el funcionalismo fabril de la “nave bien servida”, hacia el expresionismo tecnológico del denominado High-Tech.En los motivos del fracaso del proyecto, que no llegaría a construirse, subyacen los debates y conflictos —entre arquitectura e ingeniería, prefabricación y artesanía, expresionismo y funcionalismo— en los que el estudio se encuentra inmerso a finales de los años 70, y que precipitarán una nueva forma de entender la relación entre arquitectura y tecnología.

The lily, client and measure of Bruno Taut's Glashaus

A current issue in architectural scholarship is the rethinking of the origins of Modernism. As a formative exemplar of early architectural Modernism, Bruno Taut's seminal exhibition pavilion, the Glashaus (1914) [1] is understandably part of this debate. In 1959, Reyner Banham in his article, ‘The Glass Paradise’ suggested that it would be appropriate to investigate the origins of the Glashaus, as it was both vastly dissimilar to and exceeded any of Taut's previous designs. In an effort to answer this question, Banham subsequently introduced the unique role played by the Bohemian poet Paul Scheerbart in the design of the Glashaus. As a result of Banham's inference, Rosemarie Haag Bletter systematically explored the Taut/Scheerbart relationship in ‘Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart's Vision: Utopian Aspects of German Expressionist Architecture’ in 1973.

Review: The Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900–1970, by Thomas S. Hines

Thomas S. Hines The Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900–1970 New York: Rizzoli, 2010, 756 pp. $95.00, ISBN 9780847833207 Reyner Banham once suggested that historians have the advantage of looking at the world through “the rear-view mirror.” This is a privilege that can be abused—or not. What counters the advantage of hindsight is the hope that the historian will lay out the evidence in such a way that the implicit realities of history become vivid. Thomas S. Hines, in his introduction to Dione Neutra’s book Richard Neutra: Promise and Fulfillment, 1919–1932 (1986), writes, “History at its best is an analytical narrative, where ‘methodology’ pervades but never engulfs the story.” In The Architecture of the Sun , Hines materializes this sentiment in a way that approaches cultural anthropology. Indeed, for the most part Hines manages to convey a sense of frailty, a sense of being “in the moment” that in other hands might come across as inevitability, the smugness of “being right after the events” that Banham’s statement implies. The early section of the book recounts the formative period of modern California architecture that began with the work of Charles and Henry Greene. Most readers will recognize Hines’s story of the influences behind the Greenes’ iconic houses along the Arroyo Seco in Los Angeles County. Hines reminds us of the unique blend of midwestern sentiment, Spanish colonialism, Gustav Stickley, Japonism, and so on, that informed their work. His description of the ways in which these elements were adapted to the context of California, however, is what makes this such a compelling chapter. Hines reminds us how the Greenes’ lifestyle was embodied in their architecture and how their lives established a pattern their clients could use to imagine their own lives in this new landscape. He explains how the Greenes’ early training and career were defined by a rejection of European styles in favor of a search for an American identity. …