It is well known that Reyner Banham learnt to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original. Amongst the four ecologies with which he synthesized his celebration to the city in 1971 in his manifesto Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1), Autopia is the only one that does not have a specific geographic condition and just tightens the other three – Surfurbia, Foothills and The Plains of Id – together.
Reyner Banham is a post-modern representative of the tradition of European travellers whose first-hand observations of the genius loci of America provided an enlightening portrait of a nation observed from afar in magazines and movies (2). His romance with the country started with his first trip in 1961 and became a passion going beyond sense or reason (3) in Los Angeles, where he found his ideal subject: a multi-centred city developed by the language of movement, in which the population shifts shaped the enclaves of the modern city. This multi-cantered character was key to Banham, as he wrote in the opening chapter of Los Angeles: the point about this giant city, which has grown almost simultaneously all over, is that all its parts are equal and equally accessible from all other parts at once. (4)
Starting at the water’s edge, the first ecology described by Banham is the idyllic Surfurbia. The term merges the trinomial of the three Ss (Sun, Sand, and Surf) with the suburbanization of the beaches, piers and neighbourhoods spanning from Malibu to Corona del Mar. The hillsides encircling the greater L.A. basin are next; the second ecology, the Foothills, is essentially focused on luxury living. The third, labelled as The Plains of Id, are the central flatlands where the crudest urban lusts and most fundamental aspirations are created. (5)
The last and most epic of Banham’s ecologies is his polemical tribute to the expansive freeway system, in which he found a unique state of mind combining the romance of the road and the fascination for transportation as the major agent of a sprawling suburbanism which, unlike in Europe, “is an independent unit with a character of its own”. Beyond the asphalt network, what Banham named The Transportation Palimpsest is a huge board of movement that has allowed the transformation of the city from ranchos and pueblos into the isotropic metropolis.