Word: banham
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Acerb and iconoclastic, London's Reyner Banham occupies a special niche among critics of the man-made environment. He inspects his chosen topic -usually architecture or mass culture or both-with unblinkered eyes. Then he devastates all conventional wisdom about it. His new book, Los Angeles (Harper & Row; $6.95), is no exception. Spurning the popular pastime of condemning Los Angeles as an eyesore of shallow pretensions, Banham raises a rare intellectual voice in its favor. "Los Angeles does not get the attention it deserves," he writes. "It gets attention, but it's the attention Sodom and Gomorrah received...
Consider L.A.'s notorious sprawl. Banham finds the city did not spread like a cancer to its present 455 sq. mi. Its precise shape was predetermined decades ago by the Pacific Electric Railway's network of rapid-transit tracks. Though critics frequently scoff that such sprawl makes L.A. seem like 100 communities in search of a city, Banham sees instead the excitement of diversity. The jumble of freeways that has replaced the old P.E. railway has maintained the diversity. Far from being destroyers of the urban texture, Banham says, the superhighways "seem to have fixed Los Angeles...
Under the Palms. Nor is Angeleno architecture the appalling hodgepodge of the bland, the garish and the awful that its critics claim. Packed with masterworks by architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill and Richard Neutra, it ranks with the world's best, Banham believes. His conclusion: L.A. is not a horrible harbinger of how the auto and the single-family house can wreck other U.S. cities. Rather, the city of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula is unique, unprecedented, unrepeatable...
...bubbles is all but irresistible. Twice since 1968, would-be deflators have pierced Harvard's bubble−but an alarm system brought maintenance crews on the double. Actually, a certain amount of leakage is desirable. "Air-supported buildings must leak," explains English Architecture Critic Reyner Banham. "They are living things. They must breathe." If they are not allowed to breathe, strange things happen: the blowers that constantly pump air into the enclosed space cause pressure to build up, and the building begins to screech, pull and tug. To those within the bubble, says Banham, "it's like being...
...family never had an animal menace like this, said British Farmer Benjamin Banham, whose forebears have been tilling the soil near Great Yarmouth for 500 years. "Last fall they cleared out seven acres of my kale and 40 tons of swede [a kind of turnip grown for cattle fodder]." In Burgh Castle, after trapping 460 of the same varments that ate Banham's kale, Farmer John Berry was near despair: "If they carry on the way they do," said he, "they'll be master of the land in three years...