Sneha Girap (Editor)

Reyner Banham

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit
Nationality
  
British

Name
  
Reyner Banham


Role
  
Critic

Reyner Banham Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles MAISON ORION

Full Name
  
Peter Reyner Banham

Born
  
2 March 1922 (
1922-03-02
)
Norwich, England

Alma mater
  
Courtauld Institute of Art

Occupation
  
Architectural historian

Notable work
  
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960)The New Brutalism (1966)Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971)

Died
  
March 19, 1988, London, United Kingdom

Education
  
Courtauld Institute of Art

Books
  
Los Angeles: The Archi, Theory and design in the first m, The Architecture of the Wel, A Concrete Atlantis, Megastructure: Urban Futures of

Similar People
  
Esther McCoy, Thomas Hines, Kevin Starr, Julius Shulman, Dolores Hayden

Reyner banham loves los angeles 1972 bbc


Peter Reyner Banham, FRIBA (2 March 1922 – 19 March 1988) was an English architectural critic and prolific writer best known for his theoretical treatise Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and for his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. In the latter he categorized the Los Angeles experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each ecology. Banham worked in London, but lived primarily in the United States from the late 1960s until the end of his life.

Contents

Reyner Banham SCIArc Media Archive Reyner Banham Myths Meanings And

Text on trial reyner banham the architecture of the well tempered environment


Life

Reyner Banham SCIArc Media Archive Reyner Banham Myths Meanings And

Banham was born in Norwich, England to Percy Banham, a gas engineer, and Violet Frances Maud Reyner. He was educated at Norwich School and gained an engineering scholarship with the Bristol Aeroplane Company, where he spent much of the Second World War. In Norwich he gave art lectures, wrote reviews for the local paper and was involved with the Maddermarket Theatre. In 1949 Banham entered the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where he studied under Anthony Blunt, Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner, who was his doctoral supervisor, invited Banham to study the history of modern architecture, following his own work Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Banham cut across Pevsner's main theories, linking modernism to build structures in which the 'functionalism' was actually subject to formal strictures. Later, he wrote a Guide to Modern Architecture (1962, later titled Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture).

Reyner Banham latimesblogslatimescoma6a00d8341c630a53ef0154

In 1952 Banham began working for the Architectural Review. Banham also had connections with the Independent Group, the 1956 This Is Tomorrow art exhibition – considered by many to the birth of pop art – and the thinking of the Smithsons and of James Stirling, on the 'New Brutalism', which he documented in his 1966 book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? He predicted a "second age" of the machine and mass consumption. The Architecture of Well-Tempered Environment (1969) follows Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948), putting the development of technologies such as electricity and air conditioning ahead of the classic account of structures. In the 1960s, Cedric Price, Peter Cook, and the Archigram group also found this to be an absorbing arena of thought.

Reyner Banham The Man Who Wrote Too Well

Green thinking (Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies) and then the oil shock of 1973 affected him. The 'postmodern' was for him uneasy, and he evolved into the conscience of postwar British architecture. He broke with utopian and technical formalism. Scenes in America Deserta (1982) talks of open spaces and his anticipation of a 'modern' future. In A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900–1925 (1986) Banham demonstrates the influence of American grain elevators and "Daylight" factories on the Bauhaus and other modernist projects in Europe.

Reyner Banham Afflictorcom Reyner Banham

As a professor, Banham taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo, and through the 1980s at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He had been appointed the Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University shortly before his death, but he never taught at the institution. He was also featured in the short documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles; in his book on Los Angeles, Banham said that he learned to drive so he could read the city in the original.

In 1988 he was awarded the Sir Misha Black award and was added to the College of Medallists.

In 2003, Nigel Whiteley published a critical biography of Banham, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, in which he gives an in-depth overview of Banham's work and ideas.

References

Reyner Banham Wikipedia


Similar Topics