Banham, Reyner
Banham, Reyner
Bio Sketch
British architectural critic and historian (1922–1988). A key figure in postwar architectural discourse, associated with the Independent Group and early theorization of Pop Art's relevance to architecture. His Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) analyzed L.A.'s car-oriented urbanism as a legitimate architectural phenomenon, anticipating aspects of Venturi and Scott Brown's embrace of the commercial strip. His work bridged Modernist orthodoxy, Brutalism, and the emerging sensibility that would become postmodernism.
Key Works
- Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960)
- The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment (1969; 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1984) — the "second culture" thesis: plumbers and consulting engineers as "another culture… so alien that most architects held it beneath contempt," and the eighteenth-century rupture "that divorced the 'art' of architecture from the making and operating of buildings" (quoted via Lupton & Miller 1992/2006, p. 207) (not yet ingested)
- Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971)
- "A Home Is Not a House" (Art in America, 1965) — the essay (titled in one wiki source's notes as "A House Is Not a Home") that carries the Standard of Living Package, the campfire shelter-dichotomy, and the "un-house" — not yet ingested directly; quoted at length via Gattegno & Johnson (2018) and paralleled via Webb's chapter (see automobile-vernacular, drive-in-house, the-campfire).
Key Concepts
- modernism
- postmodernism
- commercial-vernacular
- automobile-vernacular
- drive-in-house
- bathroom — via the "second culture": the plumbers' room, the well-tempered environment's domestic form (via Lupton & Miller)
Relevance to Geoffrey's Research
Banham's willingness to take "low" architectural culture (gas stations, freeways, drive-ins) seriously prefigures Venturi and Scott Brown's method and the broader shift from Modernist purity to postmodern inclusiveness. His 1965 Letter from America — "a radical change in the basic programming of a building" — is also the seed text of the interior cluster's machine-age branch: Michael Webb's Drive-in House is drawn directly from it, and his A Home is not a House (1965) is one of the two themes organizing Webb's Two Journeys.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
Source notes in this wiki that quote or substantially engage this author:
- Inside out (Webb 2018) — Webb's chapter reports Banham's 1965 Letter from America to Britain, quoting his praise of "the automobile-induced vernacular of mobile homes and drive-ins that represented a radical change in the basic programming of a building," the drive-in as "just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels. You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the car," and the "ballroom in the wilderness" — the passage that generated Webb's Drive-in House (see automobile-vernacular).
- From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — the chapter reconstructs Banham's campfire/un-house programme as the genealogy of responsive urban installations: the two shelter types (avoidance — "under a rock, tree, tent, or roof" — vs. "actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire"); the campfire's "unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability"; the Standard of Living Package as "an atmosphere maker" ("breathing out warm air along the ground … radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo") and "a sentient structure, one able to sense its surroundings and provide multiple gradients of space surrounding it"; and "the dream of the un-house" — the anti-architectural dissolution of the envelope that G&J's Lightswarm/Datagrove/Murmur Wall extend to the data grid (see the-campfire, sentient-spaces).
- Topology and interiority: Folding space inside (Voordouw 2018) — the topological priority claim: Voordouw dates architecture's engagement with topology from Banham's "The New Brutalism" (Architectural Review, December 1955), where topology described the Smithsons' Sheffield project — the "connectivity" (topology) of circulation, inside/outside, and penetration, historically "subservient to platonic geometry (building form)." Banham's brick/billiard-ball deformation anecdote displays "the banality of topology"; in his article "topology is separate from form, subservient in the architectural hierarchy of circulation… In the coming decades, these two considerations would merge." The citation makes Banham the unacknowledged first theorist of the fold's architectural career — thirty-eight years before Lynn's "Folding in Architecture" (see topology, brutalism).
- Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — the "second culture" thesis operationalized: Lupton & Miller attribute the modern bathroom/kitchen regime to "what Reyner Banham has called 'another culture,' comprising plumbers and consulting engineers – a culture 'so alien that most architects held it beneath contempt'" (from The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment [1969], 1984 ed., p. 9, quoted p. 207) — Banham's "historical rupture in the discourse of design in the eighteenth century that divorced the 'art' of architecture from the making and operating of buildings." The pair extend Banham's second culture with a third party he did not name: "the consumers – often female – who increasingly came to influence the shape of domestic space" (pp. 207–208). The citation makes Banham the patron historian of the domestic-machine cluster: the rooms the architect never designed (bathroom, kitchen) are the well-tempered environment's first built instances (see mechanization, machine-for-living).
