Theory and Design in the First Machine Age

"This is still a very important book today. Reyner Banham revised what we understand as modern architecture. The first designers, critics and historians saw modern architecture mostly in terms of how industrial technology had transformed structure and space. Banham focused instead on the imaging of these new technologies, which led him to stress expressionist and futurist architecture far more than the first generation of readers of modern architecture. His revision was also an attempt to periodise modern design. The book was written in the context of the Independent Group in London – the group that launched the idea of pop art. From that moment Banham had enough distance from the modern movement of the 1920s and 1930s to reassess it. As his key criteria was the imaging of technology, Banham supported architects like [the avant-garde architectural group] Archigram. In a way they were neo-futurists. They embraced the wildest fantasies about new technologies, and how they might transform contemporary architecture and urbanism beyond recognition. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This book is important for me personally because it offers a model of how a critic-historian, inspired by changes in his own time, can look back to a prior moment of transformation and not only see it anew but also put it in parallax with his own moment. As one reads the book, one goes back and forth between the historical object of study and the contemporary scene of Banham and friends. The double focus clarifies both times."

"Banham is one of the people who taught me how to write, to the extent that I have learnt, of course. He was a professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London but he also did this kind of funky journalism in New Society and The Listener, when they did funky journalism. He was very involved in the Pop movement – he was one of the organisers of the 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow. He was in love with America and Americana and he showed me that you can be an academic and have an intellect but you can still write about cars. He legitimised the study of pop culture. He undermined the assumptions of the Modernist Movement, the assumption being that there is only one true direction of history. Pevsner was an art historian but he gives a wilful interpretation of his own, while Banham gets down to the documents and finds out about the Russians and the fact that the leading lights, people like Malevich, were actually from the backwaters of Eastern Europe, far from the modern world but yearning for the symbolism of machinery. This book is a perfect history of architecture and design in the first 40 years of the 20th century."