Defending Los Angeles

Acerb and iconoclastic, London's Reyner Banham occupies a special niche among critics of the man-made environment. He inspects his chosen topic --usually architecture or mass culture or both--with unblinkered eyes. Then he devastates all conventional wisdom about it. His new book, Los Angeles (Harper & Row; $6.95), is no exception. Spurning the popular pastime of condemning Los Angeles as an eyesore of shallow pretensions, Banham raises a rare intellectual voice in its favor. "Los Angeles does not get the attention it deserves," he writes. "It gets attention, but it's the attention Sodom and Gomorrah received, primarily a reflection of other peoples' bad consciences."

Consider L.A.'s notorious sprawl. Banham finds the city did not spread like a cancer to its present 455 sq. mi. Its precise shape was predetermined decades ago by the Pacific Electric Railway's network of rapid-transit tracks. Though critics frequently scoff that such sprawl makes L.A. seem like 100 communities in search of a city, Banham sees instead the excitement of diversity. The jumble of freeways that has replaced the old P.E. railway has maintained the diversity. Far from being destroyers of the urban texture, Banham says, the superhighways "seem to have fixed Los Angeles in a canonical and monumental form, much as the great streets of Sixtus V fixed baroque Rome."

Under the Palms. Nor is Angeleno architecture the appalling hodgepodge of the bland, the garish and the awful that its critics claim. Packed with masterworks by architects including Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill and Richard Neutra, it ranks with the world's best, Banham believes. His conclusion: L.A. is not a horrible harbinger of how the auto and the single-family house can wreck other U.S. cities. Rather, the city of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula is unique, unprecedented, unrepeatable.

If Banham is plainly smitten by Los Angeles and its laissez-faire ways, the love is based on understanding. To discover the city's true dynamics, he studied old deeds, maps, reports and above all the enduring visual record of buildings set in stucco, wood and glass. In the process, he even learned to drive (at the age of 44).

He finds that the city's psyche took form in the 1880s, when the first waves of midwestern farmers arrived by the trainload. What they sought in L.A. was not urbanity but a continuation of their dispersed, self-reliant way of life. Thus, Banham says, "Los Angeles is the Middle West raised to the flashpoint, the authoritarian dogmas of the Bible Belt and the perennial revolt against them colliding at critical mass under the palm trees. Out of it comes a cultural situation where only the extreme is normal." To reinforce that pattern, Hollywood bloomed in the 1920s, adding a permanent "population of genius, neurosis, skill, charlatanry, beauty, vice, talent and plain old eccentricity."

In turn, the people were shaped by the city's topography. To the west lies the splendor of 70 continuous miles of white sandy beaches. This coastline enhances transcendental (as opposed to commercial) values. Says Banham: "A man needs only what he stands up in--usually a pair of frayed shorts and sunglasses." In contrast are the foothills, where grand houses perch precariously on steep, lush gardens, the perfect incubators of the "fat life" of affluence and privacy.

Glorious Spontaneity. Between ocean and mountain stretches the broad, featureless plain whose uninspired development Banham calls "Anywheresville/ Nowheresville." But soon freeways stamped man's imprint on this heartland too. Each great road had the potential to become "a work of art, both as a pattern on the map, as a monument against the sky, and as a kinetic experience." Of course, the roads bred more cars, and cars bred what Banham calls "a coherent state of mind." One symptom: the emphasis on driving everywhere, a "willing acquiescence in an incredibly demanding man/machine system." Another: the customized car as a form of exuberant self-expression.

As Banham sees it, Los Angeles' hall-mark is a glorious spontaneity. Certainly the city fostered a self-confident new architecture unlike any other elsewhere. A good example is Simon Rodia's famous Watts towers, which are "unlike anything else in the world." A true Southern California building recognizes the outdoors to such an extent that it has five entrances, Banham notes, "none of which is the main one." He also celebrates the riot of commercial structures that have sprouted under the hot sun like exotic weeds: restaurants shaped like hats, milk cans or owls, and squat concrete structures garnished with billboards or slathered with ornamentation. But he detests the proliferation of glum office towers that are "not Los Angeles but memorials to a certain insecurity of spirit among timid souls who cannot bear to go with the flow of Angeleno life."

Le Corbusier once said that a dream x 1,000,000 = chaos. Banham believes that Los Angeles disproves the equation. To him, the city embodies the reality of the American Dream to combine an urban homestead with suburban good living. Does the city thus seem a bit too eager and guileless, therefore comic? In answer, Banham quotes another Los Angeles observer, Nathanael West: "It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance."

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