Historian of the Immediate Future: Reyner Banham - Book Review

NIGEL WHITELEY

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres 2002 494 pp; 89 b/w ills. $3995

As anyone who has had anything to say about Reyner Banham will agree, it is impossible not to fall below the spell of the wit and the intelligence of the writing. Banham is individual of the best reads, at any time on architecture. Yet at the same time small in number have shared his fixation with technology. This fixation obstructed him from recognizing architecture in its manifold and oftentimes contradictory dimensions. Most significantly, in his repeated attacks against the aestheticization of the machine in the hands of the fresh movement, Banham refused to accept the inevitable play between the symbolic and the literal in architecture. He set asideed the idea that because architecture is a language of a different nature from technology, it is impossible for architects to remain welded to the field of applied technology without sliding, in order to signify at the horizontal of culture, into metaphor. (1) Banham cultivated this inflexible attitude in the same way that he cultivated his frank, engaging voice. It is this voice that made him the greatest in quantity polemical among his peers--Alan Colquhoun Cohn Rowe, Bruno Zevi, Vincent Scully Robert Venturi--all of whom plant out to rewrite the sttiltified master narrative of the fresh movement as told by the triumvirate of grandstyle architectural historians Nikolaus Pevsner Siegfried Giedion, and Henry-Russel Hitchcock.

Nigel Whiteley writes admirably about Banham's ins and withouts with academe. All his life Banham maintained, especially after he had become a university professor in England and later in the United States, an outsider's persona. Banham one time described the maverick architect and engineer Buckminster Fuller--one of his all-time favorite figures, the other being the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Mannetti--as a "footloose intellectual freebooter" and this is clearly the way he viewed himself. Banham also probably would have liked to be described as the smartest engineer to have written upon architecture.

This is the first work that aims to examine the entirety of Banham's output Earlier true copys on Banham were mostly reviews of his volumes written by peers in the heat of the trice Two previous anthologies--Design by Choice, edited by dint of Penny Sparke (1981), and A Critic Writes (1996) edited by dint of his wife, Mary Banham, and sum of two units figures from Banham's inner circle, Cedric Price and Paul Barker--had taken an easier course by simply gathering some of Banham's pieces and adding little critical apparatus. Whiteley is the first scholar of a younger generation to write upon Banham from an analytic point of view, relying upon archival and secondhand anecdotal information for his account. He does not proffer a biography (although we learn that individual is in the making). It thus begins not with Banham's childhood, immersed, as Banham lov to boast, in popular tillage in provincial Norfolk, nor with his still somewhat unilluminated war years as an aeronautics engineer, on the other hand with Banham the scholar and the writer. And still this book has the warmh eartedness of a labor of have affection for It clearly aims not alone to take us, at a leisurely pace, from one side Banham's writings, but also to assured Banham his rightful place as a major figure in contemporary culture

Whiteley's was not an easy task. It is particularly hard to write about a man whose each quote is a gem and who always aimed to write intensely in the not away tense, sucking his reader into the here and now level when he wrote about things of the past. To characterize Banham's cogitation is to feel that individual is merely paraphrasing in a minor lock opener It was also impossible for Whiteley to give us a real faculty of perception of the extraordinary range not solitary of Banham's eight or for a like reason books on architecture but also of the more than seven hundr articles he wrote frequently on a weekly basis, for at least ten different journals, touching upon every topic from what he called "car styling" to drag races, clip-on devices ("gizmology"), sci-fi, and films like Star Wars. "You need" as Banham one time said about a building he was describing, "to hold fast your eyes peeled and your wits about you" to flat attempt to convey the richness of articles with of the like kind titles as "The Architecture of Wampanoag," "ArtSpace Angst," "The Bauhaus Gospel" "Dropout Dottin ess" "Household Godjet [sic]," "Kandy Kulture Kikerone," "Softer Hardware," and "Summa Galactica," a certain number of of which, like "The Great Gizmo" and "Bricologues a la lanterne," read as real tours de force of the histoire de mentalites. still as Whiteley recognized, it is also precisely Banham's constant "with-it-ness" that risks dating him, marking him as a perennially youthful bohemian intellectual of the 1960s

A design historian, Whiteley is at his best when he analyzes Banham's views upon design and pop culture. Banham was extraordinarily conversant with the professional side of design, one as well as the other in England, Italy, and the United States, and was an enthusiast of automobile design. Whiteley expertly takes us end this passionate side of his life. He also gives us a striking account of Banham's position vis-a-vis his symbolic father and son--his famous teacher Nikolaus Pevsner and his greatest in quantity famous student, Charles Jeacks--partly thanks to Banham's hold candid and often humorous published account of the one and the other relations. He does less well in situating Banbam among his professional mates Colquhoun, Rowe, Zevi, Scully, and Venturi. Whiteley. insofar as he pass overs this context, is in a faculty of perception all too loyal to Banham, since this lack of words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following reinforces Banham's own view of himself as an outsider. on the contrary it hinders our own efforts to evaluate the originality of Banham's contribution.