Reyner banham biography of william
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WILLIAM STOUT ARCHITECTURAL BOOKS
Banham, Reyner. Williams. Richard J.
Cl. NYC 2021
SKU S03334
Reyner Banham (1922–88) was a prolific, iconoclastic critic of modern architecture, cities, and mass culture in Britain and the United States, and his provocative writings are inescapable in these areas. His 1971 book on Los Angeles was groundbreaking in what it told Californians about their own metropolis, and architects about what cities might be if freed from tradition. Banham’s obsession with technology, and his talent for thinking the unthinkable, mean his work still resonates now, more than thirty years after his death. This book explores the full breadth of his career and his legacy, dealing not only with his major books, but a wide range of his journalism and media outputs, as well as the singular character of Banham himself.
304 pp., Many B/W illus.
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Los Angeles by Reyner Banham
Robert Fishman
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 and Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York 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), 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 prod
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The New Brutalism by Reyner Banham
Reyner Banham attempts to codify the then-emerging architectural movement of Brutalism
Originally published in AR December 1955, this del av helhet was republished online in July 2010
‘L’Architecture, c’est, avec des matières bruts, ètablir des rapports émouvants’– Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture
Introduce an observer into any field of forces, influences or communications and that field becomes distorted. It is common opinion that Das Kapital has played old harry with capitalism, so that Marxists can hardly recognise it when they see it, and the widespread diffusion of Freud’s ideas has wrought such havoc with clinical psychology that any smart patient can make a nervous wreck of his analyst. What has been the influence of contemporary architectural historians on the history of contemporary architecture?
They have created the idea of a Modern Movement – this was known even before Basil Taylor took up arms against false historicism