Reyner Banham

A pioneering architectural study of the seventy-mile-square city and the historical process which has made it unique as a human settlement.

The Architecture of Four Ecologies

Los Angeles

First published in 1960, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age has become required reading in numerous courses on the history of modern architecture and is widely regarded as one of the definitive books on the modern movement. It has influenced a generation of students and critics interested in the formation of attitudes, themes, and forms which were characteristic of artists and architects working primarily in Europe between 1900 and 1930 under the compulsion of new technological developments in the first machine age.

Theory and Design in the First Machine Age

Peter Cook

David Greene

Martin Pawley

Michael Webb

Michael Sorkin

Ron Herron

Warren Chalk

Dennis Crompton

Archigram comprised Warren Chalk (1927-88), Peter Cook (1936-), Dennis Crompton (1935-), David Greene (1937-), Ron Herron (1930-94), and Michael Webb (1937-). Together, in the 1960s and early 1970s, they envisioned the future of architecture in ways that enthralled a generation. In an era defined by the space race, they developed a 'high-tech', lightweight, infra-structural approach that stretched far beyond known technologies or contemporary realities. They devised autonomous dwellings and focused on survival technology; they experimented with megastructures and modular construction systems; they explored mobility through the environment, and the use of portable living capsules: all through the medium of an incredible series of drawings and models. Archigram's influence has been profound and enduring. They gave the High-tech movement its impetus; they inspired architects such as Renzo Piano and Norman Foster; and they laid the ground for the design of buildings such as the Pompidou Centre. This book catalogues Archigram's activities over fourteen years, together with commentaries by the architects and critics writing then and now. Edited and designed by Archigram member Dennis Crompton, it has been 40 years in the making. AUTHORS: Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, Ron Herron, David Greene and Michael Webb are the founder members of Archigram. Their theoretical work began in the 1960s as a cry against "the crap then going up in London". Although they never constructed a building together, their influence over a generation of architects continues to be felt today. The group was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 2002. Reyner Banham was one of the leading architectural commentators in the decades when Archigram was active, and the author of Megastucture (1976), which featured their work. Martin Pawley documented the architectural scene in London from the 1970s onwards from the perspective of a restless insider. His writing about Archigram is incisive and colourful. Michael Sorkin is an architect and urbanist whose practice spans design, planning, criticism, and teaching. His books include Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings (1991). SELLING POINTS: * Comprehensive documentation of Archigram's iconic works * Generous landscape format allows drawings to be reproduced at a large scale * Contributions from all Archigram members, and essays by critics writing then and now 500 colour, 50 b/w images

The Book

Archigram

A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike. It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains--decades after its codification--more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type. Banham, among the most gifted and incisive architectural critics and historians of his time, sought connections between theoretical origins in Le Corbusier's more starry-eyed drawings to the flurry of theories by the Japanese Metabolist architects, to less intentional examples in military architecture, industry, infrastructure, and the emerging instances in pop culture and art. Had he written the book a few years later he would find an abundance of examples in speculative art and science fiction cinema, mediums where it continues to provoke wonder to this day. A long-sought study by an author who combined imagination, wit, and pioneering scholarship, the republication of Megastructure is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople alike to return to the origins of this fantastic urban idea.

Urban Futures of the Recent Past

Megastructure

Guide to Modern Architecture

Describes the one hundred year history of internal atmosphere and light management systems from convection-duct ventilation to solar-wall heating

Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment

The New Brutalism: Ethic Or Aesthetic?

Theory and Design in the First Machine Age by Reyner Banham

Originally published: London: Allen Lane, 1971.

Scenes in America Deserta

The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment presents the fundamental aspects of the architecture of the well-tempered environment. This book considers what architects had taken to be the proper use and exploitation of mechanical environmental controls, and shows how this had manifested itself in the design of their buildings. Organized into 12 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the history of the mechanization of environmental management. This text then explains the accumulation of capital goods and equipment needed to produce a moderate level of civilized culture in pre-technological societies, which requires that building materials be treated as if valuable and permanent. Other chapters consider that it is necessary not only to create habitable environments, but to conserve them. This book discusses as well the kind of technology of environment in the 19th century. The final chapter deals with the liberation of architecture from the ballast of structure. This book is a valuable resource for architects.

The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment

"The Age of the Masters was the age of an architectural revolution that lasted over fifty years - from Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow Art School at the beginning of the century to Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin at the end of the sixties. While they lived, the Masters comprised some of the most powerful architectural talents the Western world has yet produced, and at least two men of towering genius - Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Their aspirations for the future of men, cities, and society may have been thwarted, but the prototypes they created still reflect the light of their creative fervor..." --

A Personal View of Modern Architecture

Age of the Masters

This book examines the ways Angelenos relate to the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills.

Reyner Banham was a pioneer in arguing that technology, human needs, and environmental concerns must be considered an integral part of architecture. No historian before him had so systematically explored the impact of environmental engineering on the design of buildings and on the minds of architects. In this revision of his classic work, Banham has added considerable new material on the use of energy, particularly solar energy, in human environments. Included in the new material are discussions of Indian pueblos and solar architecture, the Centre Pompidou and other high-tech buildings, and the environmental wisdom of many current architectural vernaculars.

Richard Misrach

Desert Cantos

"Let us listen to the counsels of American engineers. But let us beware of American architects!" declared Le Corbusier, who like other European architects of his time believed that he saw in the work of American industrial builders a model of the way architecture should develop. It was a vision of an ideal world, a "concrete Atlantis" made up of daylight factories and grain elevators.In a book that suggests how good Modern was before it went wrong, Reyner Banham details the European discovery of this concrete Atlantis and examines a number of striking architectural instances where aspects of the International Style are anticipated by US industrial buildings.

Reyner Banham

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