Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

Reyner Banham

1971. Harper & Row. 256 pp. $22.95. BBC video here

Indoors? Outdoors? In Los Angeles, it doesn’t matter much. This distinction organizes the lives and minds of easterners and architects, but it floats away in the soft Southern California air. But in a subtler form it remains, as Rayner Banham observes in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. “As the car in front turned down the off-ramp of the San Diego freeway, the girl beside the driver pulled down the sun-visor and used the mirror on the back of it to tidy her hair. Only when I had seen a couple more incidents of the same kind did I catch their import: that coming off the freeway is coming in from outdoors. A domestic or sociable journey in Los Angeles does not end so much at the door of one’s destination as at the off-ramp of the freeway, the mile or two of ground-level streets counts as no more than the front drive of the house.” {213}

In a way, Banham knew this before he knew it. As he says at the book’s beginning, “Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.” {23}

Banham added his book to the pile of Southern California architecture books already on the table in 1971 because he felt the others took too narrow a view of architecture, omitting the exotic and fantastic vernacular buildings, the freeways, and the customized cars. {22, 221-2} Both in explicit words and in its gentle, rhythmic form, his book denies the claim that Los Angeles is ugly and incomprehensible. His four ecologies – surfurbia, the foothills, the “Plains of Id,” and “Autopia,” alternate chapters with four architectures – the exotic, the fantastic, the exiles (the first generation of professionals), and the latest style (the next generation of professionals including Eames). And each of these is modulated by chapters on downtown, the freeways, and transportation.

Banham treats his modernists with a respect hard to find these days, but his book doesn’t overwhelm the reader/viewer with full-color plates piled inside a volume the size and weight of a tombstone. Johnie’s hamburger stand gets the same basic black-and-white treatment as Case Study House 22 (you’ll recognize it even if you don’t know it by that name).

If Mike Davis (writing Ecology of Fear a generation later) growls, Banham gives a sophisticated purr. But Banham isn’t just about purring. He blows away two all but universal misconceptions of LA – that it was created by the automobile, and that it sprawled outward from the central original pueblo. In fact, the skeleton of today’s Los Angeles was laid out by its railroad system, most notably the Pacific Electric’s Big Red Cars. Check out the map on page 80 if you don’t believe it. LA was there, in outline, by 1880, when Henry Ford was still a teenaged tinkerer. {78} “Los Angeles,” Banham writes, "has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense. But the automobile is not responsible for that situation, however much it may profit by it.” {75}

Nor did LA spread outward from a once dominant center. It’s the creation of many centers. Again, check out the maps on pages 202-203 if you don’t believe it. “To speak of ‘sprawl’ in the sense that, say, Boston, Mass., sprawled centrifugally in its street-railway years, is to ignore the observable facts.” {203}

Writing all but 40 years ago, Banham had not given up on the suburban American dream (or on the right of others to pursue it). In a characteristically mild way, he proposed that the hodgepodge system that created LA be allowed to continue {139} and observed an analogy in the helter-skelter mix of institutions (public pavement, private cars, obtrusive signage, radio broadcasts) that make the freeways work. {219}

Banham called the intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego freeways a work of art. {90} But his love of LA and freeways didn’t blind him to inconvenient truths he encountered:

• Convenient and fast and pleasant as he found the automobile then, he also wrote, “What seems to be hardly noticed or commented on is that the price of rapid door-to-door transport on demand is the almost total surrender of personal freedom for most of the journey.” {217}

• An admirer of Disneyland, he put his finger on its great irony. “One can only compare it to something completely outrageous, like the brothel in Genet’s Le Balcon. . . . Set in the middle of a city obsessed with mobility, . . . Disneyland offers illicit pleasures of mobility,” in the form of transportation options that don’t exist outside of its confines: “steam trains, monorails, people-movers, tram-trains, travelators, ropeways,” as well as steamboats, submarines, and space trips. {127-8}

• The classic view south from Griffith Park {170-171} gets a double-page spread. Banham regards this as one of the world’s great urban vistas, but he’s well aware that many regard it as the visual proof of Los Angeles’s dismal nature. Here he slips the knife in gently: “One of the reasons why the great plains of Id are so daunting is that this is where Los Angeles is most like other cities: Anywheresville/Nowheresville. Here, on Slauson Avenue, or Rosecrans or the endless mileage of Imperial Highway, little beyond the occasional palm-tree distinguishes the townscape from that of Kansas City of Denver or Indianapolis. Here, indeed, are the only commercial streets in the US that can compare with the immense length of East Colfax in Denver; the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and boring enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West.” {172-173}

This kind of honesty allows his work to resonate even with those with 21st-century interest in (re)urbanizing cities. Take a gander at the story of Wilshire Boulevard – a solid commercial streetfront with parking at the rear and residences back of that. Banham sees it as a period piece — “a unique transitional monument to the dawn of automobilism” {87} -– but that doesn’t mean we have to. Of similar interest are his observations of small plazas and pedestrian shopping malls. {152, 156}

Banham encountered a distinguished Italian architect who "doubted that anyone who cared for architecture could lower himself to such a project and walked away without a word further.” {235} This book is his reply. “Any city that could produce in just over half a century the Gamble house, Disneyland, the Dodge house, the Watts Towers, the Lovell houses, no fewer than twenty-three buildings by the Lloyd Wright clan, the freeway system, the arcades of Venice, power-stations like Huntington Beach, the Eames house, the Universal City movie-lots, the Schindler house, Farmers’ Market, the Hollywood Bowl, the Water and Power building, Santa Monica Pier, the Xerox Data Systems complex, the Richfield Building, Garden Grove drive-in Church, Pacific Ocean Park, Westwood Village paseo, Bullock’s-Wilshire, . . . is not one on which anybody who cares about architecture can afford to turn his back . . . at least insofar as architecture has any part in the thoughts and aspirations of the human race beyond the little private world of the profession.” {243-4}

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