THE ROCKET-BAROQUE PHASE OF THE ICECREAM VERNACULAR: ON REYNER BANHAM’S CRITICISM OF ARCHITECTURE AND OTHER THINGS
- Publication Type:
- Article
- Issue Date:
- 2007-10-05T02:17:22Z
Open Access
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Open Access
This item is open access.
Throughout his trans-Atlantic career as a critic and commentator, Reyner Banham turned his
attention to a vast range of objects, places and activities. This is especially true of his writing in
the 1970's and 80's, after he was invited by New Society to write (according to Mary Banham)
on 'almost any subject that intriuged him'. Mary Banham notes that 'From boyhood Reyner
Banham's interests had been very wide indeed, his curiosity particularly aroused by the
unexpected and the incongruous and most particularly by anything with wheels and/or an
engine,' and his writing is indeed marked by a respect, concern, and fascination for technical
matters, in architecture and elsewhere. But the essays from this period, ranging as they do from
'reviews' of the potato crisp to the bolo tie, the clipboard to the first Star Wars movie, also serve
to raise a series of questions about architectural criticism. Banham turned his specifically
architectural sensibility to a startling array of non-architectural, technological and practical
things, but what criteria did he use to evaluate these? How did these criteria differ from those he
used in his more conventional architectural criticism in the same period? And perhaps most
importantly, how was Banham able to reconcile practical, technological, formalist, programmatic
and historical issues, whether in a building or a Gulfstream caravan, in his arrival at aesthetic
judgement? This paper will examine selected essays from Banham's critical oeuvre to open the
question of how his criteria for judgement shifted according to the nature of the object he was
examining, and what this might mean more broadly for the theory and practice of architectural
criticism in relation to technology.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: