{"id":509,"date":"2012-04-11T12:17:13","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T19:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=509"},"modified":"2012-04-11T12:17:13","modified_gmt":"2012-04-11T19:17:13","slug":"reyner-banham-los-angeles-the-architecture-of-four-ecologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=509","title":{"rendered":"Reyner Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Livejournalist formerly known as Cobalt999<\/a> came to visit Los Angeles last week, and before he arrived, I thought I\u2019d link him up to a few items on the web to prepare him for the city. Combing through my bookmarks got me thinking about what I\u2019d include in a more general internet-based Los Angeles primer. Food critic Jonathan Gold\u2019s personal history of Koreatown<\/a> (\u201cthe fire escapes now were blanketed with cabbage leaves in the fall, clotheslines (like mine) bristled with drying fish, the silence of dawn punctuated with the steady, rhythmic pounding of garlic in wooden mortars\u201d) delivers a brief and eloquent introduction to my particular neighborhood. Public transit blogger Jarrett Walker\u2019s post \u201cLos Angeles: The Next Great Transit Metropolis?<\/a>\u201d describes what I\u2019d like to believe are the coming decade\u2019s great changes, and showcases transit as one organizing principle \u2014 and the one I most often use \u2014 for thinking about cities as wholes. Los Angeles Magazine<\/em>\u2019s recent profile of economist\/urban planner\/\u201dparking guru\u201d Donald Shoup<\/a>, who diagnoses many local ills as caused less by cars, per se, than by mandated parking infrastructure, asks, \u201cWhat if the free and abundant parking drivers crave is about the worst thing for the life of cities?\u201d<\/p>\n

These writings will all get you thinking about the workings (or non-workings) of southern California\u2019s metropolis, but even if you read none of them, make sure to watch the 1972 television documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles<\/em><\/a>. It may strike you as dated, even goofy, and I grant you that, but I find it as irresistible as Banham found this city. A British architectural critic who broke from his profession\u2019s proud and long-standing tradition of actively deriding Los Angeles at best and totally ignoring it at worst, Banham eschewed the old European or New Yorker\u2019s approach of arriving, gawping aghast at a few unusual architectural features (including but not limited to giant donuts<\/a>), and then sequestering themselves back in their hotels to commence vituperation. Not only did Banham commit the heresy of learning to drive<\/em> \u2014 “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive to read Los Angeles in the original” \u2014 he had the temerity to write an enduringly popular book about the place, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Soon after checking out Four Ecologies<\/em>, I knew I\u2019d buy the book \u2014 and I rarely buy books \u2014 for permanent addition to my Los Angeles-as-subject shelf. And though graduate school no doubt had him too busy to do much research before his arrival, Chris picked up and read my library copy during much of the downtime during his stay. The book came out in 1971, so either Banham must have written with great prescience, or Los Angeles must not have changed much in forty years, right? Yet neither strike me as true. Banham often seems to describe a city I\u2019ve never experienced and predict a future I can\u2019t say I inhabit. Without a car, I rarely enter his freeway realm of \u201cAutopia,\u201d let alone take it as \u201ca complete way of life.\u201d Prices in certain communities of his \u201cSurfurbia\u201d have long since inflated out of the reach of beach bums. I live in part of his \u201cPlains of Id,\u201d which Jonathan Gold now describes as \u201ca nightlife zone almost as dense as Tokyo\u2019s Roppongi District, a 24-hour neighborhood of neon and giant video screens.\u201d When Banham does get dismissive, he does so with a \u201cnote\u201d on downtown \u2014 \u201cbecause that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves\u201d \u2014 which describes something very different than the bustling quarter of loft-dwellers that even some Manhattanites have paid the ultimate compliment (to their minds) of calling \u201cManhattan-like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, as with all the best old books, the outdated bits serve as a history lesson and the non-outdated bits come not just as truth, but as time-tested truth. Much of the magnificent kitsch architecture at which Banham marveled still stands, albeit not quite as much as I\u2019d like. I had struggled to define a certain common type of building before reading Banham employ the term \u201cLos Angeles dingbat\u201d: \u201ca two storey walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stuccoed over,\u201d with \u201cstandardized neat backs and sides,\u201d but with fa\u00e7ades ranging from \u201cTacoburger Aztec to Wavy-line Moderne, from Cod Cape Cod to unsupported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian Gabled.\u201d I live one block off Wilshire Boulevard, the closest thing the entirety of Los Angeles has to a main street, and even today it holds as much interest for me as a pioneering \u201clinear downtown,\u201d its high commercial towers immediately giving way at the back to low-rise housing, as it did for Banham. Had he lived a decade longer, he would have seen Los Angeles become the only city in America (I suspect, anyway) where you can, in fewer than ten minutes, walk from your detached house to a subway station.<\/p>\n

What I wouldn\u2019t give for the chance to take Reyner Banham on the same tour of Los Angeles I did with Chris: from Koreatown to Westlake to Watts to Little Tokyo to Boyle Heights to downtown \u2014 all by rail. (With more aggressive ambition, I\u2019d have even wedged in Chinatown and some Amoeba Music shopping in Hollywood.) What would Banham, who mentions neither Koreans nor nor Japanese nor Central Americans, who on television walked solemnly along the then-disused Pacific Electric Railway\/Metro Blue Line<\/a> tracks, who ventures that much of the area we explored could vanish without the average Angeleno even noticing, make of it? Would he approve? Despite never once using the freeways, getting anywhere near the ocean, or so much as glancing at the striking midcentury modern residences up in the hills, I like to think Chris and I traveled in a Banhamian spirit by honoring Los Angeles\u2019 robust multi-centeredness. And I wouldn\u2019t for a moment have considered ignoring Watts Towers, the hand-built monument to Los Angeles\u2019 public eclecticism by way of private individualism that he anachronistically but reverently includes on all the book\u2019s maps going back to the mid-19th century. We just got there a different way. But I wonder: did we do so in a different mindset?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Livejournalist formerly known as Cobalt999 came to visit Los Angeles last week, and before he arrived, I thought I\u2019d link him up to a few items on the web to prepare him for the city. Combing through my bookmarks got me thinking about what I\u2019d include in a more general internet-based Los Angeles primer. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":514,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions\/514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}