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Banham's four ecologies
On the other hand, there are many who do not wish to read the book, and would like to prevent others from doing so; they have soundly-based fears about what might happen if the secrets of the Southern Californian metropolis were too profanely opened and made plain. Los Angeles threatens the intellectual repose and professional livelihood of many architects, artists, planners, and environmentalists because it breaks the rules of urban design that they promulgate in works and writings and teach to their students. In so far as Los Angeles performs the functions of a great city, in terms of size, cosmopolitan style, creative energy, international influence, distinctive way of life and corporate personality … to the extent that Los Angeles has these qualities, then to that same extent all the most admired theorists of the present century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, have been wrong. The belief that certain densities of population, and certain physical forms of structure are essential to the working of a great city, views shared by groups as diverse as the editors of the Architectural Review and the members of Team Ten, must be to that same extent false. And the methods of design taught, for instance, by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning in New York and similar schools, must be to that same extent irrelevant.[1]
1 Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York: Penguin, 1972), 236-7. The highly entertaining linked 1972 BBC documentary, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, doesn’t include these sentiments directly.
Remarks: 3 of 3
Remark · cmb · 13 June 2007
And to accompany that scene with Ed Ruscha at the drive-in, this quote, so dated and wide-eyed and deliciously un-American, about hamburgers (Chapter 6, ‘Architecture II: Fantastic’, p. 111):
Like the film, the hamburger is a non-Californian invention that has achieved a kind of symbolic apotheosis in Los Angeles; symbolic, that is, of the way fantasy can lord it over function in Southern California. The purely functional hamburger, as delivered across the counter of say, the Gipsy Wagon on the UCLA campus, the Surf-boarder at Hermosa Beach or any McDonald’s or Jack-in-the-Box outlet anywhere, is a pretty well-balanced meal that he who runs (surfs, drives, studies) can eat with one hand; not only the ground beef but all the sauce, cheese, shredded lettuce, and other garnishes are firmly gripped between the two halves of the bun. (...) But the fantastic hamburger as served on a platter at a sit-down restaurant is something else again. Its component parts have been carefully opened up and separated out into an assemblage of functional and symbolic elements, or alternatively, a fantasia on functional themes. The two halves of the bun lie face up with the ground beef on one and, sometimes, the cheese on the other. Around and alongside on the platter are the lettuce leaves, gherkins, onion rings, fried potatoes, paper cups of relish or coleslaw, pineapple rings, and much more besides, because the invention of new varieties of hamburger is a major Angeleno culinary art. Assembled with proper care it can be a work of visual art as well; indeed, it must be considered as visual art first and foremost, since some components are present in too small a contribution—for instance, the seemingly mandatory ring of red-dyed apple, which does a lot for the eye as a foil to the general greenery of the salads, but precious little for the palate.
Remark · zbs · 13 June 2007
“Apotheosis” both symbolic and actual. In my experience hamburgers in that city are unrivaled. Danny Meyer’s burger, often considered a fighting entry for New York, barely competes with the local chain on the opposite coast.
Remark · cmb · 13 June 2007
And between the coasts we have Burger Tex, which I will sincerely miss.
Texans are pretty okay with the burgers.