A Critic Writes - Essays by Reyner Banham (Paper)

1. Auflage, (A Centennial Book) 1999
ISBN: 978-0-520-21944-1
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 366 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 190 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 722 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Banham, Reyner

Banham, Mary

Lyall, Sutherland

Price, Cedric

Barker, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Design Produktdesign, Industriedesign
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His many books include Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1973), Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1980), and A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture (1986). Mary Banham is an artist, editor, and curator who collaborated with her husband on his books and articles. Paul Barker, for many years editor of New Society, writes and broadcasts on social, environmental, and cultural issues. Sutherland Lyall, Literary Advisor to the Banham estate, has written seven books on architecture, design, and building. Cedric Price is an internationally acclaimed architect. The editors currently live in London.