Word: banham
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...reflexive impulse to preserve everything, even the relatively new and banal, occasionally shows signs of getting out of hand. "People are just beginning to talk about ' '50s classics' now, which is a term that embraces some really appalling ticky-tack," says the British-born architectural historian Reyner Banham, who lives in California. "There is a tendency to overlook the aesthetic quality of a building and just keep it because it is old," says Robert Winter, a cultural historian at Occidental College in Los Angeles. "Too often the reason for declaring something ((a historic landmark)) is sentimental." Sentiment is inadmissible...
...architectural ultimate. "With Mies," wrote MOMA's Drexler in 1960, "architecture leaves childhood behind." In fact, it seems that Mies' example, brilliant in itself, provoked a prolonged architectural adolescence, a period when a stylistic conformism was enforced. To be modern, a building was obliged to wear what Critic Reyner Banham calls the "teenage uniform" of the International Style. That sort of architectural peer pressure is gone. The vital, messy pluralism now prevalent may not make for neat history, but it might produce better cities...
...site is breathtaking: 24 prime acres atop a steep ridge in California's Santa Monica Mountains. To the west there is a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean; to the east, the skyline of downtown Los Angeles. Says Architecture Critic Reyner Banham of the site: "Not since the Roman emperors built their summer villas on the isle of Capri has there been an opportunity like this...
...marble foyers and 100 Sheetrock offices, their eggbox planning, insipid detail and graceless proportions. The International Style expended itself in these shallows, not in its masterpieces. But what is the alternative? Not the culture of Vegas casinos and duck-shaped roadhouses beloved of Pop architectural theorists like Reyner Banham and Robert Venturi; trash may be language, but it remains trash. The desire for an architecture that is grand, exemplary, responsive and practical still exists. And general expectations of such an architecture have to a large extent converged on Kahn...
...Corbusier once said that a dream x 1,000,000 = chaos. Banham believes that Los Angeles disproves the equation. To him, the city embodies the reality of the American Dream to combine an urban homestead with suburban good living. Does the city thus seem a bit too eager and guileless, therefore comic? In answer, Banham quotes another Los Angeles observer, Nathanael West: "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance...