Banham, Reyner

Biographical/Historical Note

Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was a British-born architectural historian, critic, and educator. He taught at the University of London, SUNY Buffalo, New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. His writings and lectures influenced a generation of architects and historians of modern architecture. Banham's writings include reviews, journalistic and scholarly essays, and monographs. Of his many monographs, perhaps the best known are: Theory and design in the first machine age (1960), Los Angeles: the architecture of four ecologies (1971), Architecture of the well-tempered environment (1984), and Concrete Atlantis (1986). After his death, Mary Banham edited A critic writes, a compilation of Banham's essays (1996).