Books by Reyner Banham

Examines the built environment of Los Angeles, looking at its manifestations of popular taste and industrial ingenuity, as well as its traditional modes of residential and commercial building. This title also examines 'four ecologies' in the ways Angelenos relate to the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills.

This book is offered as a contribution to the history of architecture as normally understood and was produced by fairly conventional modes of architectural history writing. When the research for the present study was first put in hand, the intention was to write a purely architectual history; to consider what architects had taken to be the proper use and exploitation of mechanical environmental controls, and to show how this had manifested itself in the design of their buildings.