Books by Reyner Banham
“This is still a very important book today. Reyner Banham revised what we understand as modern architecture. The first designers, critics and historians saw modern architecture mostly in terms of how industrial technology had transformed structure and space. Banham focused instead on the imaging of these new technologies, which led him to stress expressionist and futurist architecture far more than the first generation of readers of modern architecture. His revision was also an attempt to periodise modern design. The book was written in the context of the Independent Group in London – the group that launched the idea of pop art. From that moment Banham had enough distance from the modern movement of the 1920s and 1930s to reassess it.” Read more...
Hal Foster, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
Scenes in America Deserta
by Reyner Banham
There is a sense that this vast emptiness is about to disclose something. He captures that very well
Los Angeles
by Reyner Banham
This book is about the new consumerism and whether a society can accommodate it. It’s freewheeling and observational about the texture of life. Banham writes about grand, famous buildings and petrol stations.
Interviews where books by Reyner Banham were recommended
The best books on The 1970s, recommended by Andy Beckett
Andy Beckett’s choices point to a welcome reassessment of the 1970s, that much-maligned ‘gothic’ decade, and sweep from London to Los Angeles by way of Malcolm Bradbury and John le Carré
The best books on The American Desert, recommended by Hari Kunzru
The novelist Hari Kunzru explains his fascination with the Mojave desert – a mysterious, forgotten place full of secret military sites where the silence feels like a physical weight on one’s ears
The best books on Pop Art, recommended by Hal Foster
What is pop art? Why did it catch on, and what does it mean? And what about Warhol – was his work as superficial as he liked to say it was? The art professor answers all this and more
The best books on Pop Modern, recommended by Stephen Bayley
The British design guru on which book to buy if you want to know how to design a racing car in the 1960s style, American pop culture, modern architecture, and how “Liverpool in the 1960s was like Florence in the 1440s”
