A Critic Writes
Subtitle: Selected Essays by Reyner Banham
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: January 27, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 366
ISBN-13: 9780520088559
Subjects: Architecture; Other prose: from c 1900 -; Modernism (Art); Design; Criticism; Industrial Design - General; Architecture / General; 20th century; History
First sentence: BY 1950 REYNER BANHAM had spent a year at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, studying art history.
Description: Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham (1922-1988). Born and trained in England and a resident of the United States starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings.

The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architects Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design.

In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in his appreciations of Santa Monica Pier, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system.