Classic History: Banham’s Los Angeles

When ‘Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies’ by Reyner Banham was published in 1971, it was met with scorn in some circles because it embraced the City of Angels. The critics, steeped in the work of East Coast urbanists Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, reviled Los Angeles. In the opinion of the New York Review of Books, Los Angeles was ‘the Ur-city of the plastic culture, of Kustom-Kars, and movie stars, nutburgers and Mayor Yorty and the Monkees, the Dream Factory, fantasy land, Watts and the barrio, glass and stucco-built, neon-lit, chrome-plated, formica-topped.’ Yet, looking at this list in 2009, it seems to touch on so many of the prominent issues of the last generation, from popular culture and design to our deepest social trends and troubles.   While Banham focused primarily on architecture, his book also was a study of the history and urban environment of Southern California. The book has just been reissued by the University of California Press and features a new foreword by Los Angeles architect and scholar Joe Day that captures some of the significant ways the city has changed since Banham wrote about it.   Architecture historian and critic Banham (1922-1988) arrived in Los Angeles from his native England in 1968 to work on four talks for BBC radio on the city. They were ‘Encounter with Sunset Boulevard,’ ‘Roadscape with Rusting Rails,’ ‘Beverly Hills, Too, Is a Ghetto,’ and ‘The Art of Doing Your Thing,’ which focused on the outsider art and craft tradition in Southern California, from decorated surfboards and crash helmets, to Simon Rodia’s iconic Watts Towers.   In these early radio pieces, Banham’s Los Angeles ecologies began to emerge: the beach, the foothills, and the freeways, with a fourth, ‘The Plains of Id,’ about the flat sections of the basin and valley, that would develop later. His subsequent book was interspersed with four essays on the city’s architecture, focusing on early practitioners (such as the Greene and Greene brothers) to the exile architects (R.M. Shindler and Richard Neutra chief among them) and postwar practitioners Craig Ellwood and Palisadians Charles and Ray Eames.   Banham also wrote on the importance of symbolic architecture in the city’s commercial zones, such as realized in the Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard or a variety of fast-food establishments. He chronicled the history of local transportation, from the interurban rail system, to the freeways of the 20th century.   Banham also appreciated the important of the high and the low, the functional and the symbolic, and how the city’s built environment reflects the region’s geographical complexity.   For Banham, Pacific Palisades represents the line where the beach community ecology, ‘Surfurbia,’ meets the ‘Foothills.’ He defines the stretch of beach as running from Orange County to Malibu, from R. M. Schindler’s Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach to Craig Ellwood’s 1955 Hunt house on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He writes: ‘Between the two, the beach varies in structure, format, orientation, social status, age of development, and whatnot, but remains continuously The Beach.’ He notes that the houses standing between the beach and the highway in Malibu create a ‘private preserve.’   On the importance of Santa Monica Canyon, he elaborates: ‘It is the point where Los Angeles first came to the Beaches. From the garden of Charles Eames’ house in Pacific Palisades, one can look down on a collection of roofs and roads that cover the old camp-site to which Angelenos started to come for long weekend picnics under canvas from the beginning of the 1870s.’ The journey could take up to two days in each direction.   In his beach section, he also visits Venice (which ‘has the charm of decay’), the nascent Marina del Rey, and oil-rigs off Long Beach. The beach communities, in the late 1960s, represented the high and the low, the rough and the finished, the fantasies of one generation (theme and amusements parks) abandoned, but not yet recast into the gentrified communities that emerged in subsequent decades. The Foothills, in Banham’s time as in our own, represent the ‘fat life,’ the desire for the Arcadian life dating back to the city’s origins. The foothill ecology is about ‘narrow, tortuous residential roads serving precipitous house-plots that often back up directly on unimproved wilderness even now; an air of deeply buried privacy even in relatively broad valley-bottoms in Stone Canyon or Mandeville Canyon,’ he writes. Banham only touched on the danger of mudslides, brush fires, and the other threats associated with life in the foothills.   ’Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies’ provided a whole new way of writing about cities. Initially taken as a drive-by approach to Los Angeles, it has emerged as a central text on the city. As Anthony Vidler notes in his 2000 introduction to the book, Banham’s work ’emerges as a tightly constructed part manifesto, part new urban geography, that, joined together, form an entirely unique kind of history.’ For Vidler, Banham ‘engages the city as it is, refusing to lower its gaze in the face of sprawl, aesthetic chaos, or consumerist display.’   Perhaps because of its uncompromising vision, Banham’s book has remained au courant. ‘I’ve read the book once a decade,’ Joe Day said in a recent interview with the Palisadian-Post. ‘I discovered it while an undergraduate at Yale. I was desperate to find a site for architectural projects and ended up siting my last project in the cloverleaf of the 10 and 405 freeways.’   Day, now 42, recently reread Banham’s book to write the new foreword. His essay seeks to discuss some of the major changes that occurred in Los Angeles architecture and its urban identity since the publication of Banham’s book in 1971. Aside from the physical changes of the city, Day notes how rich the last 20 years have been on new scholarship on Los Angeles and how much of that writing has been fostered by the J. Paul Getty Research Institute.   Day’s involvement with the reissue was serendipitous. He received a call from Lindsie Bear, an editor at the University of California Press, to brainstorm a list of names of people who might write an essay for the reissue. ‘The further we got into the conversation, the more excited I got about submitting an essay for the book. Within two to three months I had a rough draft.’ For Day, Banham’s book is about the ‘potential of Los Angeles. It introduced the notion of recursive history, a form of writing urban history that introduces new themes and cycles back on itself to recalibrate its findings as they are produced. It marks a shift in urban theory.’   Out of this recursive history came Mike Davis’ 1990 ‘City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles.’ While Day was pursuing his master’s degree at Southern California Institute of Architecture, he met Davis. The two later co-taught a course on prison architecture and infrastructure, a topic that has stayed close to Day’s own work. His current scholarly project looks at the impact of the growing number of prisons and museums on the cultural landscape in the last 20 years.   During the decades since ‘Los Angeles’ was published, Day thinks the city has becomes ‘normalized’ and Banham ‘canonized.’   ’Los Angeles is no longer the mid-century exception; now, it’s more typical than prototypical,’ he said. ‘Los Angeles is a provocative place–a capital of design and design education. It’s categorically different from the time of Banham’s writing.’ In Day’s mind, the present Los Angeles is no longer defined by the sunshine or noir binary, but rather plays with the range between simplicity and complexity in the cultural spectrum.   In the short space of his essay, Day was only able to touch on the diversity of voices in the city’s architectural and design community. He’s an active member: working on designing a series of screening rooms for the Columbia College Hollywood in Tarzana and on a forthcoming exhibition based on his research into museums and prisons.   When Day goes home to Silver Lake each night, Banham isn’t too far removed: he and his wife, the political scientist Nina Hachigian, have a two-year-old son named Reyner Avo Day.