Los Angeles (Part I)
Part of an ongoing series that revisits different ideas I explored as part of my graduate studies in the Environmental Humanities.
RESPONDING TO REYNER BANHAM: LOS ANGELES (FORWARD, PP. 1-76)
As a case study in spatial forms and how topography impacts place (and vice versa), Los Angeles serves as a compelling subject. As Reyner Banham suggests, this has much to do with the fact that it has emerged so recently (in an era where its rise can be tracked and documented in record), and that it's rise and spread has been roughly equal across the whole expanse of the LA Basin. Furthermore, in the natural environment at hand, Los Angeles has emerged around topographical features utterly unique to its setting and pivotal in informing its surreal character.
Like many who have not visited the city my primary exposure to Los Angeles has come via word of mouth and what I have seen in film. The picture often presented in these mediums is often paradox. Both sunny and polluted; socially diverse and bankrupt of creativity; a place of despair and broken dreams and simultaneously a topography where imaginations run wild and dreams literally come true. The sense of LA that emerges from such dichotomies is of a place trapped in deep schizophrenia. And maybe it is for this reason that I found the view from Banham's eyes so unexpected, lighthearted and refreshing.
In Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, Banham organizes an argument that Los Angeles is formally understood as a dynamic set of topographical regions fundamentally united by a culture of both style and mobility. In the sections under consideration he provides a look at one area informing the LA identity, its access to beaches (or as he terms it “Surfburbia”). As Banham points out, access to such a large area of coastline is rare for a city as large as Los Angeles, and it places residence of the city in the unique position of literally living at the “end” of the West. And while each beach has its own distinct character (further evidence of the fractured nature of the city itself) there is much to be learned from the civic and commercial architecture that occupy Los Angeles' beach front and private communities.
Another crucial component for Banham in understanding Los Angeles is the transportation palimpsest that has fundamentally linked and shaped the city. It begins with early Spanish military roads that eventually give way to networks of rail lines and urban transit systems. As Banham notes, it is these rail networks that not only provide the “skeleton” of modern Los Angeles but also its “flesh” in the form of people and goods who enter into the Basin and begin constructing places that give the city its own internal topography. Eventually these rail networks give way to roads, highways, and massive freeway projects (often built along the same historic routes occupied by primitive roads and trains).
It is from an acknowledgement of mobility and emerging car culture that Los Angeles grows and emerges as a truly modern metropolis. Fuel for the fires of LA continue to burn on an ever expanding hinterland hell-bent on acquiring whatever water it can find as well as the dynamic social and cultural elements at play from a place that attracts a dynamically creative element via Hollywood and the film industry. In an extremely brief space, Reyner Banham elucidates these critical components of Los Angeles and helps to untangle some of the seeming contradictions and paradoxes at play in this wholly unique 20th century place.