Back Issue Hard/Soft, Cool/Warm Number 16, Winter/Spring 2002

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Book Reviews

Reviewed by Robert Fishman

Los Angeles

The Architecture of Four Ecologies

by Reyner Banham

New York: Harper & Row, 1971

Partial, polemical, and maddeningly disorganized, Reyner Banham’s 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies nevertheless ranks with Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s London: The Unique City(1) and Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York(2) as one of the most generous and discerning tributes by an architectural visitor to a great 20th-century metropolis. If, as Mike Davis has suggested in his very different City of Quartz (1990),(3) interpretations of Los Angeles tend to be either sunshine or noir, then Banham’s represents the noonday zenith of radiance. The book has the joy of one of those clear temperate winter days when the city sparkles from the Pacific to the snow-capped San Gabriel mountains, the rare days when one can still believe Banham’s assertion that Southern California “remains one of the ecological wonders of the habitable world. Given water to pour on its light and otherwise almost desert soil, it can be made to produce a reasonable facsimile of Eden” (13).(4)

Yet Banham, a widely published English architectural historian and critic who died in 1988, wrote this book not merely to celebrate Los Angeles but also to chart a new direction for world urbanism and architecture. He was the forty-three-year-old enfant terrible of architectural criticism when he first visited Los Angeles in 1965, the slashing champion of technological modernism against British fustiness, and the author of the widely admired Theory and Design in the First Machine Age.(5) But, as Nigel Whiteley shows in his brilliant new biography Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future,(6) Banham in the mid-’60s was already preoccupied with the failure of the modern movement to make good on its promise of a purified new architecture in a purified new city. He was deeply impressed with the British group Archigram and its “Plug-In City,” which offered a Pop-influenced technological utopia of constant change. In Los Angeles he discovered a real-life “Plug-In City”—“seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep”—whose energized sprawl embodied the “endlessness and indeterminacy”(3) he now sought in architecture and urbanism.

Like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, whose Learning from Las Vegas represented a parallel quest, Banham believed, in their words, that “learning from the landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.”(7) As Banham himself put it, “insofar as Los Angeles performs the functions of a great city, . . . then to that same extent all the most admired theorists of the present century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, have been wrong” (218).

Looking back at the book, one can now see some strange ironies, both in Banham’s vision for Los Angeles and in his vision for architecture.
In the realm of urbanism, the revolutionary new Los Angeles of openness and mobility that Banham extolled was in fact disappearing even as he wrote, doomed not by the theorists he mistrusted but by the very forces of growth and greed that had created the city. By contrast, his interpretation of Los Angeles architecture and its potential impact was indeed forward-looking, but in ways that Banham himself could hardly have imagined. The book thus paradoxically endures as both a celebration of a vanished era and a prophetic manifesto for a “Los Angeles school of architecture” that did not yet exist.

Banham’s Los Angeles occupies a unique timezone when the Watts riots of 1965 were fading from memory and the energy crisis of 1973 had not yet occurred; when high-paying jobs in the defense, construction, and entertainment industries had created an instant middle class that could still afford to buy the mass-produced tract houses that filled the Los Angeles basin; when each new freeway promised finally to solve the traffic problem; and when Los Angeles had emerged as a global city of the Pacific Rim; but before mass Hispanic and Asian immigration forever changed the character of a city that Banham could still describe as “the Middle West raised to flash-point”(7). (Today, Los Angeles County is a “minority” metropolis where white “Euro-Americans” comprise 31% of the population, compared to 45% Hispanic, 13% Asian, and 10% Black.(8))

In his time zone, Banham could see Los Angeles not as the Fragmented Metropolis(9) of Robert Fogelson’s pioneering 1967 history, that is, not as the sprawled-out version of a proper city, but as a magnificent 20th-century reinterpretation of urbanity itself. Banham showed that, as early as the streetcar era of the 1910s and 1920s, Angelenos had freely discarded traditional urbanism to achieve a decentralized city based on movement, individualism, and the mass ownership of single-family houses. The automobile and the freeways had merely reinforced this bent. Los Angeles promised—and delivered—an urbanism based on a freer and more intense relationship with the natural surroundings than had been possible in any previous city.

Hence the first three ecologies in “the architecture of the four ecologies,” seacoast, hills, and plain. Banham’s first “ecology”—and he uses that popular early 1970s buzzword with the appropriate abandon—was what he called Surfurbia. “Los Angeles is the greatest City-on-the-Shore in the world” (19), he proclaimed, bringing the values of “sun, sand, and surf” into the heart of the city’s culture. The Foothills comprise the second ecology. As Banham rightly observed, social status in Los Angeles correlates with height. The foothills “seem to cry out for affluent suburban residences” (82), and in places like Beverly Hills and Brentwood they achieve the grandeur that Hollywood has transformed into myth.

Even Banham admits to being dismayed by his third ecology, “The Plains of Id,” the vast flatlands of the Los Angeles basin. But he quickly recovers to assert that this heartland of sprawl is where “the crudest urban lusts and most fundamental aspirations are created, manipulated, and, with luck, satisfied” (143). The sheer scale of the city has made possible that ultimate democratic dream: mass production and ownership of the single-family house. Moreover, the very crudity of consumer culture as it spreads out over hundreds of miles of highway strip-developments gives Los Angeles its own Pop tradition of fantastic drive-in architecture and stunning signage. To deprive Los Angeles of its highway signs, he asserts, would be like “depriving the City of London of its Wren steeples” (121).

Banham’s fourth ecology is his most original (and surely the furthest stretch of the term): the Los Angeles freeway system or “Autopia.” Banham interprets the freeways as Los Angeles’s true urban monuments, not only in their overwhelming scale and essential function, but in their making the experience of mobility fundamental to the city’s character. The freeway is “where the Angeleno is most himself, most integrally identified with his great city” (203); therefore, “the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement,” and he even learned to drive “in order to read Los Angeles in the original” (5).

If Banham’s identification of the Los Angeles freeway with mobility rather than traffic-jams now seems naive, indeed, if the book seems too often to display the synthetic optimism of a 1970s smile-logo, we must be careful not to blame Banham for failing to foresee the negative trends that would later preoccupy Mike Davis in City of Quartz. The recession and oil-crisis of the 1970s would bring the destruction of the mass-production blue-collar economy, drastic cut-backs in schools, highways, and other government services, inflation of housing prices, and a widening divide between the prosperous and the largely immigrant poor. (More positively, this period would also see the flourishing of an immigrant-based blue-collar workforce that would make the city the nation’s premier manufacturing center, as well as a cultural diversity that has vastly enriched its life.)

But Banham might more properly be faulted for largely ignoring the concerns embodied in Davis’s more recent work, The Ecology of Fear (1998).(10) Despite his brandishing the word “ecologies” in the title, Banham was surprisingly insensitive to the inherent costs of “endlessness and indeterminacy” on an environment that was always dangerous, fragile, and resistant to human settlement. And even in the 1960s, Los Angeles was already moving inexorably toward that environmental and demographic overload that would forever compromise precisely the values of mobility and openness that Banham celebrated. With its 9.8 million people—up from seven million when Banham wrote—the Los Angeles region now has an average density as high as that in the New York region.(11) But it still lacks the effective transit alternatives and vital pedestrian street-life that Banham disdained in 1971 as relics of the old urbanism.

If Banham’s vision for Los Angeles must now be relegated to the past, what then of his vision for Los Angeles architecture? In defending the city as a “sympathetic ecology for architectural design,” Banham indeed foresaw the city’s present eminence, but, I would argue,
he only partially glimpsed the causes. For Banham in 1971, Los Angeles was already “one of the world’s leading cities in architecture” (226), the site of a notable tradition which he lovingly traces from Irving Gill and Greene and Greene through Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra. The mark of this tradition is what he calls “modernism without angst” (46). The Los Angeles modernists operated in a culture in which the key values of innovation and openness were already deeply entrenched. They could therefore relax and open their designs to the vitality of the city itself. As an important counterexample, Banham cites the severely modernist Los Angeles Case Study Houses of the 1940s and 1950s, whose “puritanism and understatement” cut them off, in Banham’s estimation, from the real energies of the city (212). The lesson is clear: Los Angeles architects can lead the world, but only if they respond to the city’s contemporary Pop vitality.

The strengths and limitations of this interpretation can perhaps best be understood in his brief but telling examination of Frank Gehry, written when Gehry was still a marginal figure even in Los Angeles. Banham discusses Gehry in the course of arguing that “simple stuccoed boxes” were central to Los Angeles vernacular architecture and that “anyone who begins to understand Los Angeles visually has to accept, even celebrate their normative standing” (179). He then identifies Gehry’s 1965 Danziger Studio as just such a “celebration,” a work of elegance and sophistication that also shows Gehry as the model of an architect learning from vernacular Los Angeles (179-180).

But this analysis ignores what is perhaps the most striking feature of the building: the hostile way the two blank facades literally wall out the street-corner site. One can argue that this site deserved such hostility, with its ceaseless rush of traffic and sidewalks eternally empty of pedestrians. This, however, only reveals that Gehry’s relationship to the city was more complicated than the celebration of the urban vernacular that Banham emphasizes.

As one sees in the Danziger Studio and more strikingly in Gehry’s own 1978 Santa Monica house and subsequent work, there is indeed a readiness to respond to the city’s sunshine and space, but there is also the acknowledgment of Los Angeles noir. Indeed, the best work of the “Los Angeles School” stands on that knife-edge where openness meets disintegration. It incorporates the in-your-face ugliness of the Los Angeles streetscape, the fragmentation, anomie, and chaos of what Dana Cuff has recently characterized as “the provisional city.”(12) It shows the dystopian elements of Charles Jencks’s “heteropolis,”(13) the real face of a metropolis caught between the dream of unlimited freedom and mobility, and the disturbing reality.

Exactly as Banham had hoped, the special qualities of Los Angeles urbanism have indeed provoked an important new school of architecture. But this architecture at its best synthesizes sunshine and noir. It ultimately embodies an interpretation of the city that is more nuanced and profound than anything in Banham’s book.

Notes

1. London: Jonathan Cape, 1934.

2. Subtitled A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

3. New York: Verso, 1990.

4. In this review, all numbers in parentheses refer to pages in the University of California Press paperback edition, 2001, with an introduction by Anthony Vidler.

5. New York: Praeger, 1960.

6. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

7. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972, 3.

8. United States Census Bureau, Census 2000, Los Angeles County, California, Table QT-PL.

9. Subtitled Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

10. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.

11. William Fulton, Rolf Pendall, Mai Nguyen, and Alicia Harrison, Who Sprawls Most? How Growth Patterns Differ Across the United States (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2001), 2.

12. The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

13. Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots and the Strange Beauty of Hetero-Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1993).