Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971)
by Reyner Banham
Anybody who has ever lived in Los Angeles for any period of time or found anything worthwhile about the city should read this book. Foreigners to this city tend to be either overly enthusiastic or overly pessimistic about Los Angels, and Banham is no exception, but his enthusiastic, optimistic and romantic attitude toward the city doesn’t degrade the book’s historical and architectural facts. And his attitude at times is contagious.
In his comments on driving you can see clearly how his enthusiasm colored his project, but also led him to at-times accurate conclusions and views of Los Angeles:
“How then to bridge this gap of comparability. One can most properly begin by learning the local language; and the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree, as Richard Austin Smith pointed out in a justly famous article in 1965, and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with he flow of its unprecedented life. So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.” (5)
One criticism of this book has been that it’s all over the place. It’s chapters jump from history to architecture to cultural criticism. I didn’t particularly find this to be a bother. There’s a lot of information crammed in there in a way that keeps you (if you have a short attention span like me) interested.
His four ecologies:
- Surfurbia (nearly 70 miles of beach; surfing brought to CA thanks to Pacific Electric Railroad’s attempt to “stimulate flagging passenger traffic on weekends” (31))
- Foothills (Bunker Hill; pedestrian cities vs. not (77); on map of income distribution “the financial and topographical contours correspond almost exactly” (79))
- The Plains of Id (”the history of Los Angeles is a story of the unscrupulous and profitable subdivision of land” (143), where the freeways are placed and areas with little or no access is matter of economy)
- Autopia (freeways inescapable in sight and as means of movement (196); “private freedom and public discipline” (198), “private car and public freeway” (199); “willing acquiescence” (199) “surrender of will to the instructions on the signs” (201))
notes on architecture:
- “Modern architecture in Los Angeles started withh the useful advantage that the difference between indoors and out was never as clearly define there, nor as defensive” as in Europe or other parts of the U.S. (39)
- Spanish Colonial Revival architecture no “identifiable or consciously adopted” but “ever-present” and spans all sorts (42-3)
- the big names: Wright, Schindler, Neutra, Weber, Davidson, Peters, Gill, Greene with a look at some of their better known works with photos and analysis
notes on transportation:
- Pacific Electric’s influence on growth and where addressed throughout the book
- “But Bullock’s-Wilshire, like the new shops on the mile, were all built with parking lots at the rear and were specifically designed for motorized access.” (69)
- “Wilshire Boulevard is one of the few great streets in the world where driving is a pleasure. It is also, of course, the first linear downtown…” (69)
- “the Santa Monica/San Diego intersection is a work of art, both as a pattern on the map, as a monument against the sky, and as a kinetic experience as one sweeps through it.” (72)
- Disneyland “ensconced in a sea of giant parking lots in a city devoted to the automobile, it provides transportation that does not exist outside—steam trains, monorails, people-movers, tram-trains, travelators, ropeways,…” (109-110)
- pedestrians—college campuses (131) and malls (133)
Banham also knows how to turn a good phrase:
“Pop ephemeridae” (4); “uniquely mobile metropolis” (5); oil rigs “like a herd of extra-terrestrial animals with inscrutable minds of their own” (!) (34); rush hour driving takes “long-range confidence and short-range weariness” (197); “profanation of their most sacred ritual by the uninitiated” (203) (cf. Didion)
and oh-so-much more…