Reyner Banham, Historian of the Immediate Future. . - Banham Enhanced - book review

Architectural Review, The, May, 2002 by Colin Davies

By Nigel Whiteley. London: MIT Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]27.50

To write a 400 page book about Reyner Banham's writings -- not his life, but his writings -- seems like a terrible idea at first. Why waste time reading about his writings when you could be reading the writings themselves? A straight biography would have been a more obvious project to undertake. There are times reading this book when one longs for more information about, and interpretation of, Banham the man rather than Banham the historian and critic. What exactly, for example, was the nature of the work he did for the Bristol Aeroplane Company during the war, and why exactly was he 'invalided out', having failed his Higher National Certificate? Banham's own explanation was stress and overwork: 'The weakest went to the wall and I was a very callow youth'-- this from a macho critic who admired 'toughness' above all and was contemptuous of any 'loss of nerve'. Was it perhaps more to do with aptitudes and ambitions, the desire to cut off his working class roots? Nigel Whiteley skims over such questions, excitin g our curiosity but leaving it unsatisfied. They may not be strictly relevant to the development of Banham's critical position, but they are interesting in themselves and answers to them might help to explain his instinctive enthusiasm for technology and popular culture, and his refusal to follow the elitist example of his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner.

But, despite its limited scope, this book turns out to be a surprisingly good read. It is not a dry textual analysis but more like a quirky history of postwar, mainly British, architectural and design theory. The Independent Group and the Smithsons, Archigram and Cedric Price, High-Tech, Post Modernism and the New Right--all are seen in a new, more revealing light when set against the background of Banham's loves and hates, his alliances and enmities, his occasional brilliant insights. Whiteley is no hagiographer -- he can be coldly critical of his subject's blind spots and prejudices -- and yet Banham's stature is enhanced rather than diminished by this study, which was no doubt the intention. And it leaves room for someone else to write a proper biography.