1971 Banham 1971

Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1885, 1860s, 1848

     [The author] aimed . . . to present the architecture . . . within the topographical and historical context of the total artifact that constitutes Greater Los Angeles, because it is this double context that binds the polymorphous . . .

     " . . . One can . . . begin by learning the local language; and the language . . . in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality . . . and the city will never be understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture . . . p. 23

    " . . . no city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture . . . p. 24

    " . . . because the Southern Californians came . . . overland to Los Angeles."

"They brought with them-and still bring-the prejudices, motivations, and ambitions of the central heartland of the USA. The first major wave of immigration came from Kansas City on excursion tickets after 1885; later they came in second-hand cars out of the dustbowl -not for nothing is Mayor Yorty known (behind his back) as the Last of the Okies, and Long Beach as the Main Seaport of Iowa! In one unnervingly true sense, Los Angeles is the Middle West raised to flash-point, the authoritarian dogmas of the Bible Belt and the perennial revolts against them colliding at critical mass under the palm trees. . .

     " . . . Miraculously the city's extremes include an excessive tolerance. Partly this is that indifference which is Los Angeles's most publicized vice, but it is also a heritage from the extraordinary cultural mixture with which the city began. If Los Angeles is not a monolithic Protestant moral tyranny-and it notoriously is not- it is because the Mid-western agrarian culture underwent a profound transformation as it hit the coast, a sun-change that pervades moral postures, political attitudes, ethnic groups, and individual psychologies. . . ." p. 25

     ". . . Where water was available, Mediterranean crops made better sense and profit, olives, vines and -above all-citrus fruits, the first great source of wealth in Southern California after land itself. . .

     "The basic plants and crops for this transformed rural culture were already established on the land before the Mid-westerners and North Europeans arrived, for the great wave of westward migration broke across the backwash of a receding wave from the south-the collapsing Mexican regime that was in itself the successor to the original Spanish colonization of California. The two currents swirled together around some very substantial Hispanic relics: the Missions, where the fathers had introduced the grape, olive, and orange as well as Christianity, the military communication line of the Camino Real and the Presidio forts, the very Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles de Porcinuncula.

     "And about all, a system of ranching whose large scale, open-handedness and al fresco style were infectious, and whose pattern of land-holding still gives the ultimate title to practically every piece of land in Greater Los Angeles. Most of the original titles granted by the kings of Spain and by the Mexican governors were confirmed by patents granted by the US after 1848 (often a long while after; land-grant litigation became almost a national sport in California) and thus bequeathed to the area a pattern of property lines, administrative boundaries, and place-names that guarantee a kind of cultural immortality to the Hispanic tradition.*

     "So the predominantly Anglo-Saxon culture of Los Angeles ('Built by the British, financed by the Canadians') is deeply entangled with remnants of Spain . . . the periodical outbursts of pantiled roofs, adobe construction, arcaded courtyards . . . the elusive but ever-present Spanish Colonial Revival style . . ." p. 27

     *[Page 28 and 29 Map of Spanish and Mexican Ranchos show the boundaries of Boca de Santa MonicaSan Vicente y Santa Monica and La Ballona.]

     "Whatever man has done subsequently to the climate and environment of Southern California, it remains one of the ecological wonders of the habitable world. Given water to pour on its light and otherwise almost desert soil, it can be made to produce a reasonable facsimile of Eden. Some of the world's most spectacular gardens are in Los Angeles, where the southern palm will literally grow next to northern conifers, and it was this promise of an ecological miracle that was the area's first really saleable product--the 'land of perpetual spring.'

     "But to produce instant Paradise you have to add water-and keep on adding it. Once the scant local sources had been tapped, wasted, and spoiled, the politics of hydrology became a pressing concern, even a deciding factor in fixing the political boundaries of Los Angeles. The City annexed the San Fernando Valley, murdered the Owens Valley in its first great raid on hinterland waters under William Mulholland, and its hydrological frontier is now on the Colorado River. Yet fertile watered soil is no use if it is inaccessible; transportation was to be the next great shaper of Los Angeles after land and water. From the laying of the first railway down to the port at Wilmington just over a century ago, transport has been an obsession that grew into a way of life." p. 31

     [Pages 32 and 33's Map of the first five railways out of the pueblo, and the water-distribution grid isn't all that specific but does show the 1875 railroad line to Santa Monica.]

     "In the decades on either side of 1900 the economic basis of Angeleno life was transformed. While land and field-produce remained the established basis of wealth, and important new primary industry was added- oil . . . commercial working did not begin until the mid-nineties and large-scale exploitation grew throughout the first quarter of the present century . . . p. 34

     [At the same time, these inter-urban commuter lines had been conglomerated into the Pacific Electric Railway, sketching the Los Angeles to be.]

     ". . . Los Angeles also acquired a major secondary industry and a most remarkable tertiary. The secondary was its port. There had always been harbour facilities on its coast, but the building of the Point Fermin breakwater to enclose the harbour at Wilmington/San Pedro from 1899 onwards was in good time to catch the greatly expanded trade promoted by the opening of the short sea-route . . . through the Panama Canal after 1914." p. 34

     [Is there any sense of how important "recreation" or "amusement" was as an industry?]

     ". . . The movies [1910] seem to have been the great imponderable in the history of the area; their economic consequences were undoubtedly great, but it was mad money that the film industry brought in, and in any case it is the cultural consequences that now seem most important. Hollywood brought to Los Angeles an unprecedented and unrepeatable population of genius, neurosis, skill, charlatanry, beauty, vice, talent, and plain old eccentricity, and it brought that population in little over two decades, not the long centuries that most metropolitan cities have required to accumulate a cultured and leisured class . . ." p. 35

     [Much of the "talent" might be home-grown if Ocean Park history is to be believed.]

     "The motor age, from the mid-twenties onward, again tended to confirm the going pattern, and the freeway network that now traverses the city, conspicuously parallels the five first railway out of the pueblo. Indeed the freeways seem to have fixed Los Angeles in canonical and monumental form . . ." p. 35

     " . . . this giant city, which has grown almost simultaneously all over, is that all its parts are equal and equally accessible from all other parts at once. Everyday commuting tends less and less to move by the classic systole and diastole in and out of downtown, more and more to move by an almost random . . . motion over the whole area. " p. 36

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

2. Ecology I: Surfurbia

     "The Beaches are what other metropolises should envy in Los Angeles, more than any other aspect of the city. From Malibu to Balboa almost continuous white sand beach runs for seventy-odd miles, nearly all of it open to public access, much less of it encroached upon by industry [although] . . . the sea is too handy a dumping ground for cost-cutting industries and public 'services' . . . Los Angeles is the greatest City-on-the-Shore in the world; its only notable rival . . . is Rio de Janeiro . . .

     "In the long view of geological time, Los Angels has only recently emerged from the ocean; most of what is now the Greater Los Angeles basin was below sea-level in Jurassic times, and has been hoisted into the sunshine by a prolonged geological lifting process . . . p. 37

     "But Los Angeles . . . was an inland foundation that suddenly began to leap-frog to the sea in the railway age, establishing on the shoreline sub-cities that initiated its peculiar pattern of many-centered growth. Angelenos (and others) hurried down to the beaches for health and recreation, then decided to stay when they discovered the railways had made it possible to commute . . .

     "'My brother, who is in the piano-business, tells me that Santa Monica uses more pianos than any other city of its size in the County. That means that Santa Monica has indeed become a home city, and is no longer simply a summer or winter pleasure resort," wrote Marshall Breeden in 1925 of the prototype of all Angeleno beach cities . . .

     "But an air of health and pleasure still attaches to the beaches, partly for good physiological reasons, and partly because the cultivation and cult of the physical man (and woman) is obviously a deeply ingrained trait in the psychology of Southern California. Sun, sand, and surf are held to be ultimate and transcendental values, beyond mere physical goods . . . The culture of the beach is . . . a symbolic rejection of the values of the consumer society . . ." p. 38

{Once pointed out, this situation was quickly corrected.}

     "There is a sense in which the beach is the only place in Los Angeles where all men are equal and on common ground. There appears to be (and to a varying degree there really is) a real alternative to the tendency of life to compartmentalize in this freemasonry of the beaches, and although certain high schools allegedly maintain a 'turf' system that recognizes certain beaches as the private territories of particular schools, it is roughly speaking possible for a man in beach trunks and a girl in a bikini to go to almost any beach unmolested-even private ones if they can muster the nerve to walk in. One way and another, the beach is what life is all about in Los Angeles.

     [This neglects the history of segregated beaches. Was the Venice black ghetto a function of oil leased lands?]

     " . . . the beach runs from the Malibu strip at the western extremity to the Balboa peninsula in the south . . . Craig Ellwood's Hunt house of 1955 at Malibu and Rudolph Schindler's epoch-making Lovell house of thirty years earlier at Newport Beach . . . Between the two the beach varies in structure, format, orientation, social status, age of development, and whatnot, but remains continuously The Beach." p. 39

     [The map on pp. 42 and 43 show the beaches.]

     ". . . 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 too 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.]

     "The most senior of the beach cities, 'San Mo' has probably the most distinctive civic atmosphere . . . Partly it is the generous planning of the street-widths, partly it is the provision of a very good municipal bus service, but chiefly it is having been on the ground long enough to develop an independent personality. The railway that failed to make it a great port nevertheless got it started as a resort city well before most of the others were even a twinkle in a realtor's eye." p. 46

     "South along the beaches, the immediately succeeding cities are much less stylish. Venice, intended to be the most stylish of the lot, was overrun by oil drilling and is now a long uncertain strip of frame houses of varying ages, vacant lots, oil-pumps, and sad gravel scrub. It has the charm of decay, but this will almost certainly disappear in the redevelopments that must follow the creation of the Yacht Harbor inland behind Venice . . . ' p. 47

     [Santa Monica Pier photo, p. 53, described as having been rebuilt in 1921, features the Santa Monica Seafood Company.]

     " . . . The reputations of the piers are understandably functional, rather than architectural, but the whole class of piers must be saluted here as the most characteristic structures in Surfurbia. The beaches are uncommonly well provided with public piers, whether commercially or municipally operated-Malibu, Santa Monica, Pacific Ocean Park, Venice . . ." p. 53

     " . . . Santa Monica, by contrast, is rich and complex and blatantly commercial, a little Luna Park, complete with off-shore parking lots, shops, restaurants and a famous enclosed carousel with apartments for rent in it corner turrets, and Charlie Chaplin used to eat at a famous restaurant near the end of the pier in his early Hollywood days . . . And if anyone sought a major monument to the heartbreak that ends the Angeleno dream, there was always Pacific Ocean Park, a recent fantasy in stucco and every known style of architecture and human ecology (including a giant artificial rock at the seaward end), a magnificent set of rides and diversions, now demolished after years of bankruptcy . . ." p. 54

     [Could this be read as a Chautauqua monument to carny come-ons?]

     [The p. 55 photo "Dereliction at Pacific Ocean Park."]

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

     "Gill [moved] towards a simplified clean-edged architecture . . . The use of skinny metal mullions and frames in Gill's windows, like the advanced tilt-slab technique for pouring concrete walls, never seems to imply a desire to prove a point about the Machine Age . . . p. 64.

    ". . . the delicious Horatio West apartments in Santa Monica of 1919. Like the earlier Lewis Courts in Sierra Madre, this is a patio scheme, but unlike the broad central court at Sierra Madre, the internal space at San Mo, broken into by arcades on either side, is so narrow that one could easily mistake it for an automobile drive-way. In any case, the great feature of the design is its upstairs living rooms, glazed around three sides to command views of sea and mountains that must have been well worth the rental when it was first built." pp. 65 and 66.

     [p. 65 photo of the Horatio West Apartments]

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

     ". . . Los Angeles has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense. But the automobile is not responsible for that situation . . . The freeway system is the third or fourth transportation diagram drawn on a map that is a deep palimpsest of earlier methods of moving about the basin.

     "In the beginning was the Camino Real . . . wandering with seasonal variations across the present Los Angeles area from south-east to north-west . . ." p. 75 "By the time the Yankees moved in, or very soon after, there must have been a well established track running down to San Pedro . . . and by the end of the [18]sixties there began to be a well-beaten track branching off the Camino Real to go down to Santa Monica, and so forth. But movement was painfully slow; two days to Santa Monica . . . "

     ". . . However much the pioneer railroad down to the harbour at San Pedro may have served the private ends of its chief promoter, Phineas Banning, owner of the rancho-land where the new port would be built, the railway was financed with public money-bond-issues by the City of Los Angeles and the County. The line began operation in 1869, connecting the business communty in the city with deep-water anchorages at Wilmington/San Pedro . . .

     "Yet it now appears that the true importance of the Wilmington line was less in its inherent usefulness than as a negotiable property . . . in the railroad deals of the next decade . . . p. 76

     ". . . Wilmington line was part of the king's ransom the Southern Pacific extracted from Los Angeles . . .

     ". . . in 1874 . . . Senator J.P. Jones of Nevada floated a rival company to build a line from the pueblo to deep water at Santa Monica, to be connected with the [Southern Pacific]'s competitors, the Union Pacific . . . Jones's thwarted plan gave Los Angeles the Santa Monica Line.

     "These five lines radiating from the pueblo towards San Fernando, San Bernardino, Anaheim, Wilmington, and Santa Monica constitute the bones of the skeleton on which Greater Los Angeles was to be built . . . now duplicated by a freeway . . . they [also] brought the flesh. Subdivision of adjoining land proceeded as fast as the laying of rails-construction of the Santa Monica line began in January 1875, and land sales began in Santa Monica itself in July the same year . . ." p. 78

     ". . . given a railway system it was as convenient to live in San Bernardino or Santa Monica as on the outer fringes of the central city . . . Spring and Sixth Street line . . . horse-drawn street-cars in 1874 . . . and in the next fifteen years other street-car lines opened in Pasadena, Pomona, Santa Monica, San Bernardino and Ontario . . . by 1887 . . . George Howland's Pico Street line was operating out of downtown to serve the 'Electric Railway Homestead Association Tract' . . . p.79

     [Map of 1923 Pacific Electric Railway at its greatest extension on pages 80 and 81]

    ". . . the Pico line was the true beginning of [making every piece of land in the Los Angeles basin conveniently accessible and thus profitably exploitable] not only because it was directly linked to a subdividing company, but because it also formed the basis of the early speculations of Sherman and Clark, pioneers of the get-rich-quick electric railway . . . lines were built . . . out through Hollywood to Santa Monica with an extension to Ocean Park in 1896-perhaps the most important of all their ventures since it provided the transportation infrastructure for an area of land that was to contribute much to the present character of the city." p. 81

     "But Sherman and Clark were small fry compared to the next generation of electric railway promoters, especially Henry Edmunds Huntington, son [nephew] of Collis P. Huntington of Southern Pacific fame. In fifteen years of wheeling, dealing, buying-out the Santa Monica network, beating off rivals (including, confusingly enough, the Southern Pacific from time to time), consolidations and reorganizations, culminating in the 'great merger' he gave the city the Pacific Electric Railway (and, out of the proceeds, his palace in San Marino as the Huntington Museum and Library). The [Pacific Electric]'s 'Big Red Cars', so called to distinguish them from the narrow-gauge street railways operated by the associated Los Angeles Railway Co., operated over standard-gauge tracks that ran, for much of their lengths, over private rights-of-way, avoiding the congestion of the streets, though they had to become street railways when they entered already well-developed areas, running in central or lateral reservations.

     ". . .  Services ran down the coast to Balboa and along the foot of the Palisades to the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon . . . Not only did the [Pacific Electric] outline the present form of Los Angeles, it also filled in much of it's internal topography, since its activities were everywhere involved-directly or otherwise-with real estate." p. 82

     ". . . As subdivision and building promoted profitably increased traffic, they also produced more intersections and grade crossings where trains could be held up and schedules disrupted, so that the service began to deteriorate and street accidents began, in the twenties, to give the Big Red Cars a bad name . . ." p. 83

     [Is it possible that this privatization resulted in poor planning? This account also leaves out the role, or myth, of the automobile companies in the demise.]

     ". . . Further west, the stretch of the [Wilshire] Boulevard was regularized as part of Wilbur Cook's plan of 1906, and the continuation to the sea at Santa Monica was completed in 1919 . . . " p. 84

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

     "Both Hollywood's marketable commercial fantasies, and those private ones . . . have left their marks on the Angel City, but Hollywood brought something that all other fantasists needed-technical skill and resources in converting fantastic ideas into physical realities . . . much of Shangri-la had to be built in three dimensions, the spiral ramps of the production numbers of Busby Berkeley musical spectaculars had to support the weight of a hundred girls in silver top hats . . . pp. 124 and 125

     "This business of showing the plant to visitors as a tourist attraction has spread beyond the movie industry . . . p. 127

     [Don't the Amusement Piers predate the movie lots? Weren't they fantasies of work and travel before the movie lot? Perhaps there was less to be made of their inner workings?]

     ". . . All the skill, cunning, salesmanship, and technical proficiency are there.

     "They are also at diametrical variance with the special brand of 'innocence' that underlies the purely personal fantasies of Los Angeles. Innocence is a word to use cautiously in this context, because it must be understood as not comprising either simplicity or ingenuousness. Deeply imbued with standard myths of the Natural Man and the Noble Savage, as in other parts of the US, this innocence grows and flourishes as an assumed right in the Southern California sun, an ingenious and technically proficient cult of private and harmless gratifications that is symbolized by the surfer's secret smile of intense concentration and the immensely sophisticated and highly decorated plastic surf-board he needs to conduct his private communion with the sea.

     "This fantasy of innocence has one totally self-absorbed and perfected monument in Los Angeles, so apt, so true and so imaginative that it has gained the world-wide fame it undoubtedly deserves: Simon Rodia's clustered towers in Watts. Alone of the buildings of Los Angeles they are almost too well known to need description, tapering traceries of coloured pottery shards bedded in cement on frames of scrap steel and baling wire. They are unlike anything else in the world-especially unlike all the various prototypes that have been proposed for them by historians who have never seen them in physical fact . . .

     "And in the thirty-three years of absorbed labour he devoted to their construction, and in his uninhibited ingenuity in exploiting the by-products of an affluent technology, and in his determination to 'do something big', and in his ability to walk away when they were finished in 1954, Rodia was very much at one with the surfers, hot-rodders, sky-divers, and scuba-divers who personify the tradition of private, mechanistic satori-seeking in California . . ." p. 129

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

     "Planning in Los Angeles? . . . for this has always been a planned city; Lieutenant Ord's survey map of 1849 is also a plan for further development, and . . . a historical report to the Mayor in 1964 . . .

     ". . . the proposal that the city shall develop much as it has . . . clusters of towers in a sea of single family dwellings." p. 137

     "(1910) an appropriation of $100 . . . for the Planning Committee . . .

     " . . . planning . . . is one of those admired facets of the the established Liberal approach to urban problems that has never struck root in the libertarian, but illiberal, atmosphere of Los Angeles (whatever pockets of conventional good planning may have been created by local pockets of conventional liberal thinking)." pp. 138-139

     "Conventional standards of planning do not work in Los Angeles . . . effective planning to the mechanisms that have already given the city its present character: the infrastructure to giant agencies like the Division of Highways and the Metropolitan Water District and their like; the intermediate levels of management to the subdivision and zoning ordinances; the detail decisions to local and private initiatives; with ad hoc interventions by city, State and pressure-groups formed to agitate over matters of clear and present need . . . " p. 139

     "This is not to claim that any of these mechanisms is any more perfect than any other human institution, or works more than averagely well. . . . Bending the zoning regulations is reckoned to be a bigger area of graft than the vice industry, since changes in zoning directly affect land-values and thus impinge on the oldest Angeleno method of turning a fast buck . . .

     "Outside the administrative area of the City of Los Angeles itself, the other communities . . . have their own views on the meaning and purpose of zoning practices, and in some cases they have drafted them, and employed them, to reinforce local town planning [in order to] remain exclusive . . . " p. 141

     "So recreational living tends to become another synonym for the social 'turf' system of closed communities; systematic planning remains the creation of privileged enclaves. Less frequently it has meant the creation of underprivileged enclaves, since much of the residential planning of the late thirties, for instance, was intended to create tidy places to dispose of socially untidy people, the lower working classes as understood in the political dogma of the time . . . Within a couple more years, with the war about to break out, this kind of residential planning became a matter of urgency to house the influx of new industrial workers. pp. 145 and 146.

     ". . . mention of Spanish Colonial Revival fantasies calls to mind two planned communities . . . One is Naples, east of Long Beach . . . Subdivided by A. M. Parsons in 1903 . . .

     "The other is romantically blighted Venice. Decreed by Abbott Kinney in 1905, it created a dream city of gondolas, bridges, and lagoons out of the squaggy sands and marshes south of Santa Monica. The overall layout was the work of Norman and Robert Marsh, who also designed public structures like the ornate canal bridges, and some uninhibited private houses. It must have been a splendid vision-but in 1927 oil was struck there and fantasy had to give way to fact.

     "When I first saw it, bridges wrapped in barbed wire (because they were dangerous) spanned a single slimy canal among abandoned oil machinery and nodding pumps that were still at work. Desolation was everywhere, except where a narrow strip of houses still straggled down the ocean beach, and where two or three blocks of the original arcaded shopping street still survived on Windward Avenue. Those arcaded fragments are among the most affecting . . . The district is run-down still, something between a ghetto and a hippie haven . . . pp. 157, 158, 159 and 160.

     " . . . this undistinguished townscape and its underlying flat topography were quite essential in producing the distinctively Angeleno ecologies that surround it on every side. In a sense it is a great service area feeding and supplying the foothills and beaches-across its flatness of instant track-laying ballast, the first five arms of the railroad system were spread with as little difficulty as toy trains on the living room carpet, and later the Pacific Electric inter-urban lines, and later still the freeways. The very first railroad of all in the area, the Wilmington line, ran down across the plains to the harbour, but it was the Long Beach line of the Pacific Electric with its spurs to Redondo and San Pedro and its entanglements with the Los Angeles Pacific (which it bought out in 1906) which really began the great internal network that used the plains to link downtown, the foothills, and the beaches into a single comprehensible whole.

     "Watts was the very centre of all this action, a key junction and interchange between the long distance trunk routes, the inter-urbans and the street railways . . . " p. 173

Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp. 1976, 1971, 1906

     " . . . the basic Los Angeles "Dingbat" was probably invented by Francis Ventre during the year he taught at UCLA and lived in a prime example . . . p. 175

     "It is normally a two storey walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stuccoed over. These are the materials that Rudolf Schindler and others used to build the first modern architecture in Los Angeles, and the dingbat, left to its own devices, often exhibits the basic characteristics of a primitive modern architecture. Round the back, away from the public gaze, they display simple rectangular forms and flush smooth surfaces, skinny steel columns and simple boxed balconies, and extensive overhangs to shelter four or five cars . . . " p. 175

     "The dingbat . . . is the true symptom of Los Angeles . . . trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living . . . " p. 177

     ". . . 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