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Parallel to the freeway system there is a common ground underlying Banham’s reading of the “three geographies”: domesticity, or in his own words, domestic dreams that money can buy (6). From the great palaces of the film stars on the beaches and the hills to the unpretentious homes in the endless streets running away from the flatlands, Banham finds in Los Angeles a common romantic form of domesticity built on what he calls a “mass-produced phantasy”. The local tradition of domestic architecture has two formal ancestors –the Spanish Colonial and the California Bungalow– and one basic principle: freedom for all.

The American sense of private property has ever transcended the simple walls of a house. Garages, patios, porches, gardens, backyards are just some of the entities that, along with the house, complete the actual home and shape the functional, spatial and visual relationship between inside and outside; between private and public. Most often those annexed pieces and the interstitial spaces generated in-between are the places where domestic dreams take shape with the highest intensity. In Southern California, the environmental conditions made it possible to take advantage of that potential and translate it into a magnificent repertoire of the dialogue between indoor and outdoor living; as always, Los Angeles echoed such feature exponentially.

From Frank Lloyd Wright’s California Romanza to the Case Study Houses that were built in Los Angeles, all of them are declarative statements of the found conditions’ potential, like Frank O‘ Gehry’s Norton House, which irreverently captures the melting pot essence of Venice Beach in the 80’s. Above them all, Banham celebrates a step forward in the Eames House in Pacific Palisades: the conquest of machine-aged materials in the domestic imaginary; materials that could be beautiful and even pretty, and make a proper setting for beautiful objects. (7)

Mobility and private land-use appear to be the engines of that great environmental machine called Los Angeles, whose relentless lack of urban planning is the positive result of a process in which form (buildings) belongs to motion (cars) and, thus, is essentially impermanent. In such stage, where should a visitor go? In 1972 Reyner Banham poses the (still current) question to Ed Ruscha –painter and photographer– and Mike Salisbury -art editor of West Magazine- in L.A.’s last drive-in restaurant; Rusha’s answer is a classic: Gas stations; any kind of edifice that has to do with a car. (8)

Ed Ruscha’s series of photo books began in 1962 with Twenty-six gasoline stations, the result of the artist’s journeys between Los Angeles and his hometown Oklahoma City on Route 66. In the books that followed, Ruscha mainly focused on his visual engagement with the very ordinariness of L.A. through the exploration of the urban environment and man-made landscape. Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966) documents each structure on the stretch of Sunset Boulevard between Beverly Hills and Laurel Canyon, and was published as a double-sided 25-foot accordion foldout. The artist used a 35 mm camera mounted to a slow-moving automobile to photograph both sides of the street and developed the system in subsequent works, such as Pacific Coast Highway (1974), in which he extended the range to Los Angeles’ sprawl. (9)

Like Reyner Banham’s works on L.A., Ed Ruscha’s drive-by photography projects are an evocative vision rooted in the romance of the road and its mutant nature. In a city whose limits are hard to recognize and get blurred in a continuum of experience, both Banham and Ruscha encountered a similar fascination for the conditions in which the road becomes urban, shaping the city in a huge scale level and almost leaving the rest to the private –often unexpected– initiative. With the same enthusiasm they embraced the inverse process that intended them to keep on driving outwards.

45 years after “Reyner Banham loved Los Angeles”, his Baede-kar (10) –  an advanced fake interactive geolocative app named after Karl Baedeker, the father of the modern guidebook – may be confronted with a further futuristic perspective. Not only has mobility already evolved exponentially, but the immediate future in a natural born pilot place like Los Angeles –a few hundred miles from Silicon Valley- could be facing a shift in terms of transportation. Uber, Google, Tesla, driver-less and clean cars might be a challenge for the uncanny relationship between Angelenos and their wheels. Fortunately, L.A. has widely demonstrated its ability for dealing with contemporariness and metabolizing it into an improved system.