Fired Up

Not long after touching down in Los Angeles in 1965, the architectural critic Reyner Banham began gathering impressions for a book that would overturn the consensus of urban and cultural critics who found the city to be lousy, inscrutable, and “unserious.” Following a stint at UCLA, and countless star-studded dinner parties, Banham published Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), a work of pop historiography thin on substance but high on style. In it he famously praised the youthful, ephemeral quality that arose from the unique circumstances of the city’s creation—a place “seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep,” lacking or disavowing all the conventional markers of urbanity. Banham’s contrarian thesis was encapsulated in the book’s very first sentence: “Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape.”

But Four Ecologies was derided by several of Banham’s contemporaries who viewed his concept of urban instanta…