A critic writes : essays by Reyner Banham
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
A critic writes : essays by Reyner Banham
（A centennial book）
University of California Press, 1999
- pbk.
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Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
"Published with the assistance of a grant from teh Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts" -- t.p. verso
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings. The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies.
Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system. Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Peter Hall
1950s
1. Vehicles of Desire
2. The New Brutalism
3. Ornament and Crime: The Decisive Contribution of Adolf Loos
4. Ungrab That Gondola
5. Machine Aesthetes
6. Unesco House
7. The Glass Paradise
8. Primitives of a Mechanized Art
The 1960s
9. Stocktaking
10. Alienation of Parts
11. Design by Choice
12. Carbonorific
13. Big Doug, Small Piece
14. Old Number One
15. Kent and Capability
The Dymaxicrat
17. The Style for the Job
18. How I Learnt to Live with the Norwich Union
19. People's Palaces
20. The Great Gizmo
21. Aviary, London Zoological Gardens
22. Unlovable at Any Speed
23. Roadscape with Rusting Nails
24. History Faculty, Cambridge
25. The Wilderness Years of Frank Lloyd Wright
The 1970s
26. Power of Trent and Aire
27. The Crisp at the Crossroads
28. The Historian on the Pier
29. The Master Builders
30. Rank Values
31. Paleface Trash
32. Power Plank
33. Iron Bridge Embalmed
34. Sundae Painters
35. Bricologues a Ia Lanterne
36. Lair of the Looter
37. Valley of the Dams
38. Grass Above, Glass Around
39. Summa Galactica
40. Pevsner's Progress
41. Taking It With You
42. Hotel Deja-quoi?
43. Valentino: Simply Filed Away
The 1980s
44. The Haunted Highway
45. Dead on the Fault
46. 0, Bright Star ...
47. Stirling Escapes the Hobbits
48. Fiat: The Phantom of Order
49. Modern Monuments
50. Building Inside Out
51. In the Neighborhood of Art
On the Wings of Wonder
53. Actual Monuments
54. A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
