 | RADARRESPONSE PICKING UP NAOMI STEAD’S DISCUSSION OF CRITICISM, JULIAN RAXWORTHY EXPLORES THE LEGACY OF REYNER BANHAM – ONE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S MOST INFLUENTIAL CRITICS – TO ARGUE FOR ENGAGED AND ‘INTERESTED’ CRITICISM.
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IT’S HARD TO BE dispassionate about Reyner Banham. For me, and for the
plethora of other people with strong opinions about Banham, his writing is compelling,
and one’s connection to him as a figure quite personal. For me, frankly, he rocks. As a
landscape architect, I gleaned most of my knowledge about Modern architecture from
Banham. His Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, along with Rowe and Koetter’s
Collage City and Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture were the most
influential books in my library, by far. Later, as a budding “real scholar”, I was
disappointed to find that, while these authors had serious credibility, the writings
themselves were regarded as “polemical” – when in fact what I admired about them
most was their ability and willingness to make rough groupings and gross
generalizations, and to offer fickle opinions. It spoke to me of a real personal
engagement and an active, participatory reading of the architectural culture they
discussed. They were at their best in their witty, cutting, but generally pithy, creative
prose, such as in Rowe’s extrapolation of the modern citizen as the latest “noble
savage”, or Banham railing against conservative social advocates and their response to
high density housing: “those who had just re-discovered ‘community’ in the slums would
fear megastructure as much as any other kind of large-scale renewal program, and
would see to it that the people were never ready.” Any reader of Banham will be able to
find a gem that will relate, somehow, personally, to what they are doing right now. For
Banham, it was all personal, and the gaps in his scholarship, rather, were the
dispassionate places: “Such bias is essential – an unbiased historian is a pointless
historian – because history is an essentially critical activity, a constant re-scrutiny and
rearrangement of the profession.”
Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future, Nigel Whiteley’s recent
“intellectual biography” (the MIT Press, 2002), allowed me to revisit Banham’s
passionate mode of criticism and to consider what his legacy might be. The book
examines Banham’s body of work, grouped according to his various primary
fascinations, as well as his relationship to contemporaneous theoretical movements,
such as postmodernism. His mode of practice, as a kind of creative critic, is also
considered in some depth. While there are points where the book delves into Banham’s
personal life, on the whole Whiteley is very rigorous in considering and theorizing the
work itself: more than 750 articles and twelve books. In academic terms, this is good
practice. However, considering the entirely personal nature of Banham’s writing itself,
this separation seems artificial. Banham, as he himself noted, “didn’t mind a gossip”,
and often when reading the book I was curious about what was happening to him at the
time. Banham’s was an amazing type of intellectual practice, and one that academics
(a term he hated) could do well to learn from. While Whiteley spends a lot of time
arguing for his practice to be regarded as such, and makes strong points about both the
role of the critic, and the importance of journalism, rather than scholarly publishing, I
found myself wondering what his study looked like. What books he had in his library. Did
he smoke when he wrote? What sort of teaching load did he have? He is an inspiration
to design writers and thinkers, and I, personally, wanted to know how he did it.
When reading A Critic Writes, a collection of Banham’s popular essays (compiled by
Mary Banham, Cedric Price and Sutherland Lyall, and published in 1998, ten years after
Banham’s death), I became aware that architecture was only the dominant subheading
of his larger passion for technological culture. He wrote regularly for a range of left-wing popular magazines for the whole of his life, on topics such as surfboards, cars,
architecture, software and oil rigs – with the overarching intention of explicating what it
was to be a Modern citizen, something that he believed in passionately, and regarded
himself to pre-eminently be. As Whiteley points out, he was interested in the “cultural
content” of works of architecture, and particularly in how this was represented in form;
however, he regarded self-referential criticism as “academicism”, as navel gazing. Like
Banham, who studied engineering and then art history, Whitely is not an architect, so his
spin on Banham’s work tends to focus on larger “design” theory implications, rather than
doggedly pursuing Banham’s reading of the architectural canon. I suspect that this is
something that Banham would appreciate. But the true brilliance of Reyner Banham lies
in his ability to discuss the real particularity of form at the same time as locking it
intractably to a theoretical discussion, and in such eloquent and readable prose.
Reyner Banham was a diehard, card-carrying Modernist to the end. While the
reader initially admires him for this, when it gets into some of the allegedly “High-Tech” architecture that he remained passionate about (which seems pretty much like Victorian
machinae to me), his inflexibility is frustrating – even if one is inclined to agree with his
thoughts about postmodernism. Ecological, social and cultural consequences are all
ignored, even though he was a leftie, believing as he did that technology would
ultimately be able to sort it out. That said, however, Banham’s core ideas give him a nifty
back-out clause: he believed that “good architecture is timely not timeless”. Likewise,
his work is dated, as it should be – those times are passed. Whiteley’s biography
consolidates such themes, and strongly qualifies the sense with which “the Modern” is
used – with technology being society’s cultural link to the Modern, which Banham
believed was fundamental. Banham’s qualifications, rather, were for architecture: maybe
you were on the money in the 1920s, but it’s time to catch up! Reading Whiteley’s book,
one has to decide where one sits on technology and culture. I found myself interested in
technology, but more interested in culture’s relation to it. But given Banham’s time (in
relation to his timely/timeless argument), he was consistently a part of it.
Banham’s characterization of The First Machine Age as comprising a “respect” for
technology, and of the Second as an “expression”, left me wondering about the Third.
Whiteley fiddles around with this in relation to changes in “symbolic content”, but this
seems a lame rejigging of the form/function base to Modernism. Perhaps the Third
Machine Age is one of implicit, “ambient” technology? If so, perhaps we can ditch the
whole aesthetic – as Peter Corrigan noted in his A. S. Hook address last year, there is
less difference in the “look” of architecture in the last fifty years than in the preceding
fifty. (Considering the formalistic, though non-Euclidean, software-driven architecture of
the digital age that is everywhere now, I imagine Banham turning in his grave.Would he
favour, perhaps, the culturally complex, and still ambiently technological, work of ARM?)
Banham still provides the best model I can think of in terms of the role and practice
of the critic. When, in the process of saying what must be said, a critic offends another’s
sensibilities, we might remember: “extreme viewpoints are illuminating; animus has long
been the very breath of life to historians for as long as the tribe has existed.We may
complain about Whig historians, and Maoist historians, and Pop historians, and
Structuralist historians, but the bias they all exhibit is their point.”
JULIAN RAXWORTHY IS A SENIOR LECTURER IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AT RMIT UNIVERSITY.
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