This collection gathers era-defining essays on Pop aesthetics, the rise of consumer culture, Brutalist architecture and nascent green concerns
Best known for era-defining essays on Pop aesthetics, the rise of consumer culture, Brutalist architecture and nascent green concerns, academic and critic Peter Reyner Banham was a brilliant writer on the subjects of architecture and design. (He wasn’t bad on art either, writing frequently for ArtReview at the end of the 1940s through to the mid-1950s.) He was generally known by his surnames alone, like some very English schoolboy, and he carried that theme into his writing, which is marked by a fitting sense of mischief and fun: what design historian Penny Sparke, writing in this compendium, aptly describes as his ‘breathless enthusiasm’. His signature personal style, about which photographer Tim Street-Porter reminisces elsewhere in this volume, was no less captivating and – rather improbably – included a bushy beard, cowboy hats and bolo ties, a Norfolk accent and a folding Moulton bicycle.
This book was born out of a conference that took place at London’s Architectural Association in 2022 to mark what would have been Banham’s one-hundredth birthday. In essence, it’s a collection of his writings in which each is introduced by someone with either a personal or a current take on his work. It’s testimony to Banham’s writing skills that most of the latter feel redundant. Has language really evolved so much that we need someone to translate Banham’s thoughts on hot-rodders into thoughts on ‘hackers’ and ‘activists’? Do we need to be given a trigger warning about his attitude towards the ‘native culture’ in a 1965 article on ‘gizmos’, which might not comply with today’s perspectives on the matter? For most adults it’s better just to dive in. Who other than Banham, you wonder, while reading his tribute to the quintessential modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, would be able to connect the inventor of the catchphrase ‘God is in the details’ to Playboy patriarch Hugh Hefner, children’s modelmaking, the demands of space travel and a toilet? Who else, in a casual aside, would berate ancestral voices such as John Ruskin and William Morris for not understanding the pleasures of working in factories?
One way of understanding Banham’s mission is through his insistence that what he described as ‘the highly specific subculture of the architectural profession’ was actually part of general culture. That common sense, as he put it elsewhere, was as important as learned sense. This book proves his point.
Reyner Banham: A Set of Actual Tracks, edited by Ludovico Centis. AA Publications, £15 (softcover)
From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
