1949 Banham 1971

Reyner Banham Los Angeles:The Architecture of Four Ecologies Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1949, 1860s

     " . . . the importance of Santa Monica Canyon is that it is the point where Los Angeles first came to the Beaches. From the garden of Charles [and Rae] Eames's house in Pacific Palisades, one can look down on a collection of roofs and roads that cover the old camp-site to which Angelenos started to come for long weekend picnics under canvas from the beginning of the 1870s. The journey from downtown could take two days, so it was not an excursion to lightly undertaken, but there was soon enough traffic to justify a regular stage-run, and a semi-permanent big tent that served as a dance -hall and could sleep thirty people overnight. . ." pp. 44 and 45.

     ". . . Within a few years of the discovery of the canyon mouth as a picnic beach, the railway had hit the shore at Santa Monica, but on the southern side of the flat-topped mesa on which most of the present Santa Monica stands. Along the top of the bluff where the mesa meets the sea is the splendid cliff-top park of Santa Monica Palisades, and behind it there have always been high-class hotels as long as there has been a Santa Monica. pp. 45 and 46.

[pp. 44 and 45 have photos of c. 1870 SM Canyon and the View from the Eames House.]

     " . . . I discovered Charles Eames's house [1949] in an American magazine. . . . the Eames house has had a profound effect on many of the architects of my generation in Britain and Europe . . . For most of two decades it has shared with Rodia's towers in Watts the distinction of being the best known and most illustrated building in Los Angeles. . . ." p. 223

[Eames house photo, page 224]

     " . . . The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of a great dream, the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of a good life outside the squalors of the European type of city, and thus a dream that runs back not only into the Victorian railway suburbs of earlier cities, but also to the country-house culture of the fathers of the US Constitution, or the whig squirarchs whose spiritual heirs they sometimes were, and beyond them to the villegiatura of Palladio's patrons, or the Medicis' Poggio a Caiano. Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside . . . " p. 238

     " . . . It is the dream that appears in Le Corbusier's equation: un rêve X 1,000,000= chaos. . . . not in Los Angeles, where seven million adepts . . . can find their way around without confusion . . . p. 239.

     "The neon-violet sunset light that disquieted the sensibilities of [Nathanael] West's Day of the Locust hero by making the Hollywood Hills almost beautiful, is also the light in which I personally delight to drive down the last leg of Wilshire towards the sea, watching the fluorescence of the electric signs mingling with the cheap but invariably emotive colours of the Santa Monica sunset. It is also the light which bathes Bradbury's Martian evenings. The lithe, brown-skinned Martians, with their 'gold-coin eyes', in Bradbury's vision are to be seen on the surfing beaches and even more frequently on the high desert . . .

     " . . . there are the canals by which the crystal pavilions stand, as they were meant to stand in the dream-fulfilment city of Venice; above all, there are the dry preserved remains of the cities of an earlier Martian culture, like abandoned Indian pueblos or the forgotten sets of famous movies long ago . . ." p. 240

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017