Expendabilia

Hal Foster

Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future by Nigel Whiteley
MIT, 494 pp, £27.50, January 2002, ISBN 0 262 23216 2

Reyner Banham was as smart and sassy as any critic in the postwar period. What made him distinctive was his passion for the edgiest expressions of his technological age, not only in avant-garde architecture but in anything designed – Cadillacs and transistor radios, custom hot-rods and painted surfboards, gadgets and gizmos; all of which he discussed with great verve in 12 books and over 700 articles. Less of a media guru than Marshall McLuhan, he did possess some of McLuhan’s Futurist zeal and crossover appeal; not an inventor like Buckminster Fuller, he projected some of the technological know-how and visionary asperity of the older American. More Pop than either man, Banham became, like them, a celebrated outsider – a hit-man turned target.

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Vol. 24 No. 9 · 9 May 2002 » Hal Foster » Expendabilia (print version)
Pages 14-15 | 3802 words

Letters

From Eric James Jupitus

Hal Foster's summary of Reyner Banham's contribution to 20th-century architecture (LRB, 9 May) underlines the uncompromising nature of the Modernist project, whose influence on architecture and beyond is hardly a cause for celebration: from the mass-mechanisation of the food industry in the UK to the striking inability of postwar architects to cope with the concept of the door. This is because the true Modernist apotheosis wasn't on this earth at all, but in space. A quick flick through pop-culture representations of the space genre from the 1920s to the present shows similar design norms at work as those in the high art of Kubrick: an aversion to door handles, lapels, skirts (a hangover from the 19th-century dress reform movement), appetising food. Here is a future that is a tedium of hygiene and dreary solid-state efficiency. The refusal of Modernist architects to study most existing built environments other than to scorn them as an object lesson in how not to do architecture could almost suggest that an alternative reality would soon come to pass where the work of the Smithsons would fit in: an environment that didn't need to bother with foliage, the seasons, the walk to the shops or to work. I remember being told by my brother in the early 1970s that I shouldn't bother learning how to ride a bike because by the time we were adults we'd be floating about in a space station.

Americans were slower to embrace dystopias. There, uninhibited notions of progress and of the country as a tabula rasa – not to mention more resources – meant a much more receptive home for the Modernist ideology, even to the extent of a widespread belief in flying saucers. For all that, Star Wars does give us the Death Star, which at first sight is Lutyens in space: the abstract, pure style of his post-1918 memorials to the missing. It could be made of Portland stone. Close up it looks like a mall.

Eric James Jupitus
Glasgow

From Liz Young

Eric James Jupitus (Letters, 23 May) implies that the Smithsons weren't concerned with foliage, the seasons and so on. Nonsense. We asked them to build a couple of rooms onto our house in London. What they suggested and then built for us was a pavilion, kind of wrapped around the large sycamore along the garden wall. The bathroom, its door opposite the sycamore's great trunk in the pavilion's passage, had an astrohatch in the ceiling, so you could look up into the great green canopy as you lay in the bath. Alas the tree died, either poisoned by leaks from the gas main beneath it or from honey fungus. We still have the stump. They also put together a habitable locale for themselves within tumbledown walls in Wiltshire.

Liz Young
London W2