The Banham Lectures: Essays on Designing the Future (review)

The Banham Lectures is a collection of essays that draws from the first twenty Reyner Banham Memorial lectures, begun in London shortly after Banham’s death, to honor his significant legacy as a critic of modern life. Reyner Banham (1922–1988) first trained as an engineer and later became one of the most notable art and then architectural historians of the twentieth century’s second half. Banham transformed the way historians thought about design and architecture through the study of consumer products and the industrial cultures that produced them. He studied at the Courtauld Institute in London under Nicholas Pevsner, the great architectural historian, but considered himself “a scholarship boy,” whose working-class roots gave him the “street cred” to study the objects of everyday life. Despite producing a prolific body of written work, Banham’s first book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), is often cited as being the most influential. Elizabeth Collins Cromley, who was appointed to Banham’s position at SUNY-Buffalo after he left, writes that Theory and Design “showed me that modernist heroes’ words need not be taken at face value and that insights emerge when the mismatch between what is said and what is built is critically explored” (p. 85). Banham died at the age of sixty-six just as he was about to assume a named professorship at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Being “between jobs” when he died, this collection serves as the Festschrift that, his wife Mary Banham writes in the volume’s foreword, surely would have been published under more normal circumstances.

The volume includes nineteen essays in addition to an introduction. Rather than being organized in the chronological order in which the initial lectures were given, the editors grouped the essays into four sections. Each of the first five essays is a theoretical analysis that explores aspects of “the tools and methods of Banham’s scholarship” and they range from a focus on Banham as a teacher and lecturer to the role of images, design metaphor, and history, and the connection between high and low architectural cultures. These essays stress Banham’s pathbreaking attention to the design and manufacture of artifacts as being key to understanding the aesthetics of both architecture and consumer goods.

The successive sections are pieces by scholars whose own work has been profoundly influenced by Banham, articles by architectural critics, and a final section whose essays share less coherence with one another but have as a starting point Banham’s musings about design technologies and the future. As with any collection, there are stronger and weaker essays in this volume. Some of this variance is due to the wide range of fields represented by the various lecturers and in many cases the length of elapsed time between when the lecture was given and when the essay was prepared for the volume, which could range from a few to as many as twenty years. A few are more challenging for having been prepared as visual lectures that did not easily translate into the traditional form of an expositional piece. Some essays, such as Gillian Naylor’s on Banham’s ideas about design analysis and Charles Saumarez Smith’s on museum architecture, give the reader brilliant insights into Banham’s work and will drive many to read further. The most compelling articles are written by authors who knew Banham personally and who were best acquainted with his body of work. The volume is richly illustrated—it would be impossible to convey most of the ideas in the essays without images—and includes a full-color gallery insert in the middle.

Historians of technology who are drawn to the cultural meanings of the relationship between design, architecture, and technology will enjoy dipping into the book. As the volume’s editors note in their introduction, “Reyner Banham is not easily categorized.” Even with Banham as the touchstone, the essays tackle an...