Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (review)

The historiography of twentieth-century design has been dominated by the remarkable dynasty of Nikolaus Pevsner, champion of the high modernists of the "first machine age," his student Reyner Banham, the perceptive and often acerbic interpreter of the popularizing second, and Banham's student Charles Jencks, who has positioned himself as the chronicler of the postmodern. Of the three, Banham is far and away the most complex thinker—he was known to remark that "the only way to prove you have a mind is to change it occasionally"—and for that reason alone Nigel Whiteley's attempt at a comprehensive intellectual biography is to be welcomed.

Whereas Pevsner's celebrated Pioneers of the Modern Movement(1936) was a confident affirmation of the seeming logical necessity that led "from William Morris to Walter Gropius," Banham's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) presented a more complex and nuanced modernism: contentious, selective, prone to fits of expressionism and romanticism, and more enamored of the "machine aesthetic" than of the machine. As the technological infrastructure of the first machine age passed increasingly into the lives and under the control of consumers, in the form of transistor radios, outboard motors, and what Banham called the "noisy ephemeridae" of popular culture, the ideological campaigns of the modernists called for a more careful scrutiny.

The Banham that appears in Whiteley's detailed account is thus a transitional figure who stands between the primary colors and formal geometries of the Bauhaus and a postmodern aesthetics concerned more with "product semantics with its culturally loaded, meaningful forms and images" (p. 318). The book traces the route that led Banham to become the first scholarly critic to grapple seriously with design in what he famously called the plug-in or clip-on "throwaway society."

It was this predilection—to look beyond the manifestoes and rhetorical posturing to complex sociological realities—that propelled Banham from an engineering background to architectural history and to a fruitful association with the Independent Group in the 1960s. With this radical coterie of artists, architects, and writers he shared a fascination with trends in popular culture—automotive styling, science fiction, fashion, Hollywood movies—whose "massive initial impact and small sustaining power" seemed a more honest reflection of technological and cultural realities than the austere and supposedly timeless architecture of the International Style.

Whiteley's appreciative account is grounded in Banham's voluminous literary oeuvre—twelve books and over seven hundred articles—but he draws sufficiently upon the larger context of postwar Britain to indicate how Banham came to be outflanked both on the right, by traditionalists who found his preoccupation with Barbarella and corporate logos unseemly, and on the left, by a more socially conscious generation for whom his delight in "the aesthetics of expendability" seemed an extended apologia for mindless consumerism and a culture of waste, superficiality, and environmental irresponsibility.

As an intellectual biography, Reyner Banham is as comprehensive as one could hope—much more so, in fact. Whiteley's judgments are judicious and he strikes an appropriate balance between the appreciative and the critical, but his commentaries can be excessively detailed—quibbling over Banham's word choices or his decision to place a point in a footnote rather than in the body of a text—and they are often unbearably repetitious. There are, moreover, some consequences to the author's strategy of working almost exclusively with Banham's published texts to the exclusion of materials that might yield a greater insight into Banham himself. More a reader's guide than an intellectual biography, this book, as Whiteley freely acknowledges, "will disappoint those seeking an insight into what made the man tick" (p. xv).

Whiteley's is certainly a respectable strategy, but in the case of Reyner Banham it is somewhat frustrating. One did not need to have known or studied with Banham to appreciate the arresting quality...