Showing posts with label Reyner Banham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reyner Banham. Show all posts

Tuesday, 22 September 2015


The Sixties: Getaway People
(UK, Channel 4, 1982) 


Interesting (alright, mostly dull) documentary about the rise of car culture in Britain during the 1960s. Simple but effective title sequence, which finishes with 'The Sixties' in the same typeface as The Avengers tv series. Plenty of provincial town planners tempered with good archive footage. Well, it passes the time.

Particularly pleasing to see Reyner Banham in full ghetto-pimp clobber at 08:00, and adverts for Robochef and Ian Carmichael shilling for Paul Masson's California Carafes at the end of part one. Ah, memories!

Thursday, 24 April 2014

Summa Galactica

Design by Choice
Reyner Banham
Academy Editions, London, 1981

While we're talking Reyner Banham, I thought I would post an article he wrote for New Society in October 1977 on the Star Wars phenomenon, reprinted in a collection of his criticism Design by Choice. I should state for the record that I'm not a SW fanatic; I like it but for me it has to assume its place in the SF pantheon and it probably won't be a regular feature of this blog.

I find much of Banham's design writing fairly turgid and overwrought, though his pop culture commentary is a little easier to digest. Note this was written before the film was released in the UK; Banham was semi-resident in the US by this time, teaching at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

It's hard to see the first Star Wars film (Episode IV: A New Hope) with such clarity now, so much has happened in the intervening 37 years, and indeed continues to occur as the filming of part VII may or may not be already taking place in Abu Dhabi. Banham's contention that the film's colossal success was due to it's positioning at the heart of popular culture is hard to contest.

Whether this hurried the end of popular cinema's potential as a progressive artform is arguable. Much was changing in Hollywood at that time, though if we are looking to place the blame the decline in cinema somewhere, Skywalker Ranch might be as good a place as any.





Wednesday, 23 April 2014

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles



Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
BBC, 1972

I don't find Reyner Banham a particularly likeable individual but there are plenty of good things in this film about Los Angeles architecture, including a brief visit to the Eames House (Case Study No.8) in Pacific Palisades, possibly my favourite modernist architectural environment. Plus a chat with artist Ed Ruscha at an old-skool drive-in about his responses to LA architecture through his photobooks of Sunset Strip and paintings of gas stations.
I haven't read Banham's book on Los Angeles but I suspect it would be an interesting companion to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's seminal text Learning from Las Vegas, Banham's Modernism versus Venturi's Postmodernist approach.

Both cities were exemplar studies in the state of American architecture in the 1970s. As Banham was from Norwich and Venturi Scott Brown were a Chicago-based architectural practice, I wonder whether it took an outsider's perspective to appreciate what was going on with super-highways and the 'decorated shed'.
The film also has me laughing every time as Banham's appearance always seems so unlikely he looks like the world's worst under cover cop, and reminds me of Peter Seller's Inspector Clouseau in one of his more ridiculous disguises. Can you spot the Banham?