Historian of the Immediate Future: Reyner Banham

NIGEL WHITELEY

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 494 pp.; 89 b/w ills. $39.95

As anyone who has had anything to say about Reyner Banham will agree, it is impossible not to fall under the spell of the wit and the intelligence of the writing. Banham is one of the best reads, ever, on architecture. Yet at the same time few have shared his fixation with technology. This fixation prevented him from recognizing architecture in its manifold and often contradictory dimensions. Most significantly, in his repeated attacks against the aestheticization of the machine in the hands of the modern movement, Banham refused to accept the inevitable play between the symbolic and the literal in architecture. He rejected 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 level 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 most polemical among his peers--Alan Colquhoun, Cohn Rowe, Bruno Zevi, Vincent Scully, Robert Venturi--all of whom set out to rewrite the sttiltified master narrative of the modern 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 outs 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 once 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 on architecture.

This is the first book that aims to examine the entirety of Banham's output. Earlier texts on Banham were mostly reviews of his books, written by peers in the heat of the moment. Two previous anthologies--Design by Choice, edited by Penny Sparke (1981), and A Critic Writes (1996), edited by his wife, Mary Banham, and two figures from Banham's inner circle, Cedric Price and Paul Barker--had taken an easier route by simply gathering some of Banham's pieces and adding little critical apparatus. Whiteley is the first scholar of a younger generation to write on Banham from an analytic point of view, relying on archival and secondhand anecdotal information for his account. He does not offer a biography (although we learn that one is in the making). It thus begins not with Banham's childhood, immersed, as Banham loved to boast, in popular culture in provincial Norfolk, nor with his still somewhat obscure war years as an aeronautics engineer, but with Banham the scholar and the writer. And yet this book has the warmh eartedness of a labor of love. It clearly aims not only to take us, at a leisurely pace, through Banham's writings, but also to secure 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 every quote is a gem and who always aimed to write intensely in the present tense, sucking his reader into the here and now even when he wrote about things of the past. To characterize Banham's thought is to feel that one is merely paraphrasing in a minor key. It was also impossible for Whiteley to give us a real sense of the extraordinary range not only of Banham's eight or so books on architecture but also of the more than seven hundred articles he wrote, often on a weekly basis, for at least ten different journals, touching on 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 once said about a building he was describing, "to keep your eyes peeled and your wits about you" to even attempt to convey the richness of articles with such titles as "The Architecture of Wampanoag," "ArtSpace Angst," "The Bauhaus Gospel," "Dropout Dottin ess," "Household Godjets [sic]," "Kandy Kulture Kikerone," "Softer Hardware," and "Summa Galactica," some of which, like "The Great Gizmo" and "Bricologues a la lanterne," read as real tours de force of the histoire des mentalites. Yet, 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 on design and pop culture. Banham was extraordinarily conversant with the professional side of design, both in England, Italy, and the United States, and was an enthusiast of automobile design. Whiteley expertly takes us through 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 most famous student, Charles Jeacks--partly thanks to Banham's own candid and often humorous published account of both relations. He does less well in situating Banbam among his professional peers Colquhoun, Rowe, Zevi, Scully, and Venturi. Whiteley. insofar as he neglects this context, is in a sense all too loyal to Banham, since this lack of context reinforces Banham's own view of himself as an outsider. But it hinders our own efforts to evaluate the originality of Banham's contribution.