Sun & “Surfurbia”
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.
by Reyner Banham.
Harper & Row. 256 pp. Illustrated. $6.95.
The problem has always been rationalizing one’s basic, and essentially visceral, liking for the place. I mean, it’s just not done—expressing affection for Los Angeles, a preference for it over uptight San Francisco, the sneaky feeling that it may just be (now that New York’s decline is so obvious and so seemingly irreversible) America’s great city, if only because it so strikingly expresses what is American about America. But now the English architectural historian Reyner Banham has suggested the outlines of a platform on which to take a somewhat less temporizing stand.
His subtitle admirably outlines his theme. Los Angeles, as he sees it, is composed of four basic ecological regions (each of which has inspired an architecture suitable to it alone). There is, first of all, the great beach, in its natural state surely one of the most magnificent in the world, and in its developed state still mightily attractive and wonderfully accessible, so much so that, in Dr. Banham’s view, it all but controls the psychological climate of the city. After that come the foothills, perfect setting for what Banham persuasively insists is one of the most varied and interesting ranges of contemporary home architecture in the world. Next come the broad plains of the great valleys around the area’s core basin, where are found the most easily satirized aspects of Southern California life. Finally, there is the newest ecological region, and the only one that is entirely the work of man—the freeway system. It is the interaction of all four of these regions that makes the city what only Banham has had the courage to term it, an “unrepeatable” and “unprecedented” place.
“I share neither the optimism of those who see Los Angeles as the prototype of all future cities,” Banham writes, “nor the gloom of those who see it as the harbinger of universal urban doom.” In short, it is what it is, a place, as he says, of splendors and miseries, graces and grotesqueries, all of which are far more amusing and stimulating—to Banham, to me, and I suspect to other secret admirers—than those of virtually any other American place.
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Banham’s four basic regions function in something like the following fashion:
The beach, or “Surfurbia,” gives the city its informal and rather raffish air. From the general absence of suits and ties, girdles and stockings, a visitor gets the impression that just about everyone may be wearing a bathing suit under his work clothes, that at the very least they may be planning an early exit from the office for some sort of simple, healthy, outdoor activity of the sort that New York and the other capitals of a sterner work ethic have more or less unconsciously conspired to render practically impossible through inconvenience and/or expense. All that sea, sand, sun just minutes away, the sight of all those bronzed, barefoot adolescents heading for it, surfboards poking out of their cars at rakish angles—it does something to a man, and something I judge not to be entirely bad.
“One way and another,” says Banham, “the beach is what life is all about in Los Angeles,” pointing out that a beach society is almost always uncompartmentalized, democratic, and that its culture represents a kind of rejection of the consumer culture, since it is “a place where; man needs to own only what he stands up in—usually a pair of frayed shorts and sunglasses.” He does not mention the pace the beach seems to impose on the life surrounding it, but it is a fact that most people in Los Angeles seen to proceed as if they were strolling through soft sand. They are rarel/?/ on time for appointments, their entertainments tend to be home made and casual, rather than restaurant-made or formal, and the whole day’s schedule is more closely tied to the rising and the set ting of the sun than it is in New York.
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The beach, as Banham point out, has had a profound effect on the architecture, not merely in Malibu, but everywhere in Los Angeles. Naturally, the best examples of modernism are to be found in the more expensive enclaves and these, in turn, tend to be located in Banham’s second region—the foothills, whither the well-of quickly retreated in the early days not least because, before air conditioning became universal, it was a lot cooler there than in the valleys The first great influence on the homes they built was, naturally Spanish. Clean-lined, low-profiled rambling, hacienda-like structures built around courtyards, these buildings suggest (to me at least) many of the most desirable features of the modernism that was so quickly to follow—especially the blurring of the customary firm lines separating indoor space from out door space.
Thus, when one stays in a Los Angeles home these days one is always receiving a nasty crack on the head as one strays into the clear glass door that only nominally hinders access to pool, porch, or patio; or one finds oneself taking a bath in a glass room, the privacy of which is guarded only by shrubbery. But these minor hazards are more than compensated for by the enhanced feeling of freedom and by the wild profusion of plantings which often spill casually in from outdoors to be nurtured under skylights. Of the Angelino’s now near-instinctive tendency to dine al fresco, around the elaborate and permanent charcoal broiler, no further word need be spoken at this point. Anyway, this much is clear to me, that whatever their eccentricities, people of my class—and indeed of all classes—are able to live in Los Angeles with an ease and grace and serenity that are unimaginable to the inhabitant of any decaying Eastern metropolis.
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It is, however, in dealing with his third and fourth regions—the plains and the freeways—that Banham reaches heights of interpretive originality. San Francisco was “plugged into California from the sea,” but most Southern Californians came overland, bringing in their baggage “the prejudices, motivations, and ambitions of the central heartland.” They were for the most part farmers and what Los Angeles held out to them was the possibility of what Banham calls “urban homesteading”—that is, a combining of the amenities of city life with some semblance of their former ways. They didn’t expect to farm and commute, but on their small plots in the valleys they would have their yards, their gardens, a decent space between themselves and their neighbors. Had they been given a chance to vote on the matter, they would no doubt have opted for low-density land use, but there was no need for a referendum. They simply did as their instincts bid them to, and the city reflects that fact.
The city also, of course, reflects the tension between the mutually contradictory words of Banham’s good phrase. It may be that no city can long endure half rural, half urban. It may be that no individual can long live with such schizophrenic values, especially in an area where the gentle hedonism encouraged by climate and topology rubs insistently against the essentially puritanical cast of the Middle-Western character. Los Angeles thus becomes, in Banham’s best one-liner, “the Middle West raised to flash-point,” a place where “the authoritarian dogmas of the Bible Belt and the perennial revolt against them [collide] at critical mass under the palm trees.” The contradiction is resolved in a million excesses—the hamburger stand in the Shape of a giant toad, which my wife so fondly remembers from her happy Los Angeles childhood, the fads of food and fashion always sweeping eastward, the extreme Left-Right polarization of the area’s politics.
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Then there are the freeways, Banham’s fourth ecological region. It is true that wherever they have gone, a wretched architectural style has followed, a form of constructional plain speech Banham calls “Los Angeles Dingbat.” But it is also true, as he says, that they have become a form of topographic relief in the flat and featureless plains through which they mostly run, things of interest, if not of beauty, in not very interesting places. Moreover, it is not the freeway system, as so many have contended, that made this particular metropolis explode into fragments. The system did not get established until the end of World War II, well after the communities it linked had begun to take shape. Anyway, it disturbed them very little, since it generally followed the routes of the earlier mass transportation system, that of the Pacific Interurban Railroad which, more than any single factor, determined the precise directions of the city’s sprawl.
This bit of history goes some way toward correcting the most prevalent myth about Los Angeles, which is that its character was determined by a mindless thralldom to the automobile. One can, of course, fault the Angelinos for not preserving their very efficient interurban system, but not too much, I think. For one thing the car fit so neatly into the urban homesteader’s mentality, offering him what must have seemed a degree of privacy, of free choice, even of self-expression, very like that he exercised on his “ranchette.” And since Los Angeles alone of our great cities was still a-building as the car came into its own, its residents had the opportunity—which they took—to incorporate a proper road system into their cityscape more comfortably than was possible anywhere else in the U.S.
As a result, it remains the best urban highway system in the country. There is a generosity to its sweeping curves and to its on-and-off ramps that is unknown in the cramped East, an easy flow to its straightaways (and a careful visibility to its signs) that a commuter from Long Island must envy. Traffic jams do, of course, occur at rush hour, but the ability of a single stalled car to create a massive mess is simply unknown in Los Angeles: it takes a five-car pileup, or a jack-knifed trailer truck to do it here.
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Los Angeles acquired its bad reputation among Easterners and other outsiders at a time when such thought as there was about urban problems held that centralization was an unmixed blessing, that Los Angeles, with its crazy-quilt of zoning laws and legal jurisdictions was a prime example of the evils of a weak city hall. Yet now that decentralization, community control, and all the other contemporary catch phrases have acquired the status of conventional wisdom, no one except Banham (whose point of view is essentially that of the aesthete) has even begun to reexamine and reevaluate the one urban complex that never was centralized. Not being expert in these matters, I can’t say how it has really worked out politically and socially, though the most casual conversation indicates a high degree of interest in the neighborhood school, the local police department, etc.—maybe to that excessive point where endless argument impedes progress and reform. It is also clear that Los Angeles more or less offers what Norman Mailer promised in his “power to the neighborhoods” campaign for mayor of New York—some sort of community for al-most every imaginable human type: Orange County for the reactionaries, retirement villages for the elderly, Venice for the hippies, Bel-Air for the richies, and so on down the list. They coexist suspiciously and uneasily, but coexist they do, the pressures eased by the distances between these communities as well as by the salubrious climate.
In short, the time has clearly come to rethink the issue of Los Angeles and Dr. Banham’s quietly daring, and highly stimulating, exercise in benign iconoclasm provides a very engaging starting-point.
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