Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp.
[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 . .
" . . . 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
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 Angeles 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 . . .
"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
". . . All the skill, cunning, salesmanship, and technical proficiency are there.
" . . . 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