Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Mit Press) - Softcover

Whiteley, Nigel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262731657 ISBN 13: 9780262731652

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2003

Synopsis

An intellectual biography of the cultural critic Reyner Banham.

Reyner Banham (1922-88) was one of the most influential writers on architecture, design, and popular culture from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. Trained in mechanical engineering and art history, he was convinced that technology was making society not only more exciting but more democratic. His combination of academic rigor and pop culture sensibility put him in opposition to both traditionalists and orthodox Modernists, but placed him in a unique position to understand the cultural, social, and political implications of the visual arts in the postwar period. His first book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (still in print with The MIT Press after forty years), was central to the overhaul of Modernism, and it gave Futurism and Expressionism credibility amid the dynamism and change of the 1960s.

This intellectual biography is the first comprehensive critical examination of Banham's theories and ideas, not only on architecture but also on the wide variety of subjects that interested him. It covers the full range of his oeuvre and discusses the values, enthusiasms, and influences that formed his thinking.

About this title

About the Author:

Nigel Whiteley is Professor of Visual Arts in the Art Department at the School of Creative Arts, Lancaster University, UK.

Review:

Reynar Banham once described architectural history―at its most interesting―as a 'snap-crackle-pop subject.' Nigel Whiteley's critical reading of Banham's writings and ideas brims with informed discussion and sparkles with insights about one of the twentieth century's liveliest and keenest architectural minds.

―Joan Ockman, Graduate School of Architecture, Columbia University

Reyner Banham's wide-ranging explorations of modern architecture, commercial design, pop culture, and radical urbanism bristled with so many provocative insights that his career's trajectory resisted clear understanding. Now, fortunately, Nigel Whiteley has skillfully reconstructed the personal experiences and intellectual contexts from which Banham emerged as one of the late twentieth-century's most idiosyncratic and perpetually rewarding cultural critics.

―Jeffrey L. Meikle, Chair, Department of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Nigel Whiteley ingeniously pulls together the various strands of Reyner Banham's thought. He charts the development of Banham's diverse interests and provides a much-needed critical analysis of his long career as a historian and critic of architecture and design.

―Victor Margolin, Professor of Design History, University of Illinois at Chicago

Along the arc of his distinguished career, from work in an aircraft factory in Bristol, England, to criticism of a solar telescope at Kitt Peak in the Arizona desert, Reyner Banham embraced his time with head and heart. Nigel Whiteley gives a nuanced presentation of Banham's principled flexibility. Readers new to Banham's writing will find vivid analysis, while those already familiar with his ideas will discover fresh insights.

―Kevin Harrington, Professor of Architectural History, Illinois Institute of Technology

Nigel Whiteley expertly maps the daunting intellectual range and enduring architectural principles of the last of the great Modernist historians and polemicists. More impressively, Whiteley captures the playfulness, the mischievous wit, and the delight in playing the provocateur that distinguished Banham in person as well as on the printed page.

―Dell Upton, Department of Architecture, University of California at Berkeley

About this edition

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0262731657
• ISBN 13: 9780262731652
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 514