Reyner Banham
|
Reyner Banham FRIBA |
|
|---|---|
| Born |
Peter Reyner Banham 2 March 1922 Norwich, England |
| Died | 19 March 1988 (aged 66) London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Courtauld Institute of Art |
| Occupation | Architectural historian |
| Known for | New Brutalism |
| Notable work |
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) The New Brutalism (1966) Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) |
Peter Reyner Banham, FRIBA (2 March 1922 – 19 March 1988) was an English architectural critic and prolific writer best known for his theoretical treatise Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and for his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. In the latter he categorized the Los Angeles experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each ecology. Banham worked in London, but lived primarily in the United States from the late 1960s until the end of his life.
Banham was born in Norwich, England to Percy Banham, a gas engineer, and Violet Frances Maud Reyner. He was educated at Norwich School and gained an engineering scholarship with the Bristol Aeroplane Company, where he spent much of the Second World War. In Norwich he gave art lectures, wrote reviews for the local paper and was involved with the Maddermarket Theatre. In 1949 Banham entered the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where he studied under Anthony Blunt, Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner. Pevsner, who was his doctoral supervisor, invited Banham to study the history of modern architecture, following his own work Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Banham cut across Pevsner's main theories, linking modernism to build structures in which the 'functionalism' was actually subject to formal strictures. Later, he wrote a Guide to Modern Architecture (1962, later titled Age of the Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture).
In 1952 Banham began working for the Architectural Review. Banham also had connections with the Independent Group, the 1956 This Is Tomorrow art exhibition – considered by many to the birth of pop art – and the thinking of the Smithsons and of James Stirling, on the 'New Brutalism', which he documented in his 1966 book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? He predicted a "second age" of the machine and mass consumption. The Architecture of Well-Tempered Environment (1969) follows Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948), putting the development of technologies such as electricity and air conditioning ahead of the classic account of structures. In the 1960s, Cedric Price, Peter Cook, and the Archigram group also found this to be an absorbing arena of thought.
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