Reyner Banham, 1971:

"A city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a small downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of ancientry, Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape. Most of its buildings are the first and only structures on their particular parcels of land; they are couched in a dozen different styles, most of them imported, exploited, and ruined within living memory. Yet the city has a comprehensible, even consistent, quality to its built form, unified enough to rank as a fit subjacent for a historical monograph." [p. 21]

"Los Angeles looks naturally to the Sunset, which can be stunningly handsome, and named one of its great boulevards after that favourite evening view. But if the eye follows the sun, westward migration cannot. The Pacific beaches are where young men stop going West, where the great waves of agrarian migration from Europe and the Middle West broke in a surf of fulfilled and frustrated hopes. The strength and nature of this westward flow need to be understood; it underlies the differences of mind between Los Angeles and its sistermetropolis to the north." [p. 24]

"The motor age, from the mid-twenties onwards, again tended to confirm the going pattern, and the freeway network that now traverses the city, which has since added major aerospace industries to its economic armoury, conspicuously parallels the five first railways out of the pueblo. Indeed the freeways seem to have fixed Los Angeles in canonical and monumental form, much as the great streets of Sixtus V fixed Baroque Rome, or the Grands Travaux of Baron Haussmann fixed Paris of la belle époque. Whether you regard them as crowns of thorns or chaplets of laurels, the freeways are what the tutelary deity of the City of Angels should wear upon her head instead of the mural crowns sported by civic goddesses of old." [p. 35-36]

"The Beaches are what other metropolises should envy in Los Angeles, more than any other aspect of the city. [...] But such worries notwithstanding, Los Angeles is the greatest City-on-the-Shore in the world; its only notable rival, in fact, is Rio de Janeiro (though the open ocean-beaches of Los Angeles are preferable in many ways) and its only rival in potential is, probably, Perth, Western Australia." [p. 37]

"A building as strikingly and lovably ridiculous as this [the Tahitian Village restaurant] represents well enough the way Los Angeles sums up a general phenomenon of US life; the convulsions in building style that follow when traditional cultural and social restraints have been overthrown and replaced by the preferences of a mobile, affluent, consumer-oriented society, in which ‘cultural values' and ancient symbols are handled primarily as methods of claiming or establishing status. This process has probably gone further in, say, Las Vegas, yet it is in the context of Los Angeles that everyone seems to feel the strongest compulsion to discuss this fantasticating tendency.

[...] Las Vegas has been as much a marginal gloss on Los Angeles as was Brighton Pavilion on Regency London. More important, Los Angeles has seen in this century the greatest concentration of fantasy-production, as an industry and as an institution, in the history of Western man. In the guise of Hollywood, Los Angeles gave us the movies as we know them and stamped its image on the infant television industry. [...]" [p. 124]

"In this period of crosstown Kulturkampf, while Joan Didion was distilling her most dyspeptic imagery, a visiting British design historian, Reyner Banham, was penning the first serious celebration of the city since the booster days of the 1920s. Chief ideologue of the 1950s British 'Independent Group' - the midwife to the Pop Art explosion of the 1960s - Banham had once defined Pop as a 'firing squad without mercy or reprieve' against hieratic art traditions. From this perspective, Southern California, with its aggressive Present-mindedness, was a land purified by an exemplary design terror. Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (1971) found virtue in almost everything disdained by traditional critics, including the automobile, surfboards, hillside homes, and something called 'Los Angeles architecture'. [...] Lest anyone mistake the punchline of his book, Banham also made a companion BBC television documentary, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972).

The effect of Banham's intervention was quite extraordinary. Supported by his own brilliant prose, as well as by a new aesthetic climate prepared to reverse historic judgements in favor of 'pop' sensibilities of all kinds, Los Angeles ... the Four Ecologies became a turning-point in the valuation of the city by the international intelligentsia. Adopted universally as the textbook on Los Angeles, it established standards - vernacular, decentralist and promiscuous - that continue to frame art-world views of what is happening in California south of the Tehachapis. [...]

Although [Peter] Plagens's bitter warning about the ideological appropriation of Banham was ignored, the latter's admirers were forced to admit that he had been in error on at least one important point. In a note on Downtown - 'because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves' - Banham had dismissed the 'recentering' strategy and depreciated the city's need for. A conventional center. Given the Downtown doldrums of the early 1970s, it was impossible for him to have foreseen the landrush in the 1980s of Japanese and Canadian capital, in the context of epochal geopolitical shifts, that has made Downtown 1990 second only to Tokyo as a financial pole of the Pacific Rim. [...]" [p. 73-74]

"[...] As a work commissioned within a series entitled 'The Architect and Society' edited by the British historians John Fleming and Hugh Honor (a series that included James Ackerman's elegant monographic essay on Palladio, among others), the book was first and foremost intended as a new kind of work on a city, one that, rather than surveying major monuments and historical buildings one by one, took on the whole fabric and structure of an urban region. In this attempt, Banham worked to develop an entirely radical view of urban architecture, one that has had a major impact on the discipline of architectural history." [p. XXV]

"Angelenos had good reason for protecting their environment. By the 1960s, the city was becoming known as a hopeless mess, the product of a century of infrastructure employed for the bottom-line, of real estate development gone awry, of nouveau riche lack of taste.

In the face of such criticism, British historian Reyner Banham suggested that this antiaesthetic landscape was something that architects and planners could learn from. Fed up with the modernist plan, Banham advocated spontaneous urbanism. In his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, he produced an homage to the city after attempts to plan it had failed [...]"

"Instead of a comprehensive urban vision, Banham's Los Angeles was driven by competitive interests, government agencies, pressure groups, and above all, individuals. In Los Angeles, Banham saw a new society emerging and, along with it a new way of making buildings. He was attracted to 'the convulsions in building style that follow when traditional cultural and social restraints have been overthrown and replaced by the preferences of a mobile, affluent, consumer-oriented society, in which 'cultural values' and ancient symbols are handled primarily as methods of claiming or establishing status.' Banham valorized this bottom-up action, which he called 'Non-Plan,' as a critical counter to modernism."

"SM: Learning from Las Vegas is one of the most important books of the past century. It was published one year later than Los Angeles: [the] architecture of four ecologies by Reyner Banham. In many occasions you spoke about your interest in Los Angeles. What relationship was there between the two books? Between the authors of the two books? At the end of the 1960s, did you know Banham's work?

DSB: I knew him in England, but not very well. Yet I was one of the few people he allowed to call him ‘Peter', not ‘Reyner' - I don't know why. I've no more than skimmed his book. And... I'm trying to remember, I'm old and my memories are dim...

I remember a conversation we had in London, I think. He said: ‘The trouble with Peter Smithson is that he insists on writing'. When I asked what he meant, he said: ‘Peter should do the design and leave the writing to people like me'.

Than [sic] we lost touch and I had little contact with him in America. But in 1965, from Los Angeles, I wrote to him in London saying, ‘I've seen Las Vegas and want to write about it'. I questioned him on the British ‘RIBA Journal'. I needed colour to illustrate my slides of the signs of Las Vegas. I knew the ‘Journal' published in colour, so I asked if he thought they would accept an article on Las Vegas. He replied, ‘After Tom Wolfe, who has anything more to say about Las Vegas?' That was amusing because a few months later, Peter's own writing on Las Vegas appeared! And his views on the city's relevance were disproved when, in 1966, Bob and I visited it, collaborated on two articles and a Studio on it, and produced a book that has been in print nearly 40 years.

SM: In fact it is hard to verify the contacts between you and Banham. So, your researches are similar but not interconnected?

DSB: Not strongly, but we shared the same era and, for a while, the same place, London. We were both interested in the New Brutalists and the Independent Group that they were part of, in Team 10, and in the times, the zeitgeist, that spawned such thinking."