I never studied directly with Peter (Reyner) Banham, but without doubt he was my mentor in the truest sense of the word. His death from cancer on March 18, at the age of sixty-six, was a personal loss, and robs the world of a rare and wonderful writer.
My first encounter with Banham was in 1979, when I trekked with a fellow Bartlett undergraduate to Buffalo, in upstate New York, to meet the historian whom we had missed being taught by at University College, London, by just one year. We arrived at an unprepossessing industrial building (since given its due recognition in Banham’s last book, A Concrete Atlantis) and asked where we could find the esteemed professor. “In there,” we were told, and we boldly pushed open a brown door at the end of a corridor. We found ourselves suddenly the focus of a full raked amphitheatre of students and standing next to Banham himself, who was in full flight lecturing on—of all things—English castles. We squeezed into hard, unyielding wooden seats, and were soon seduced by Banham’s inimitable rhetoric: full of sly puns, canny conjunctions, personal anecdotes that made the archaic structures in question ring with gritty immediacy. His voice, a mellifluous Bristol burr, was unexpectedly “country”—like gnarled bark whittled and steeped in apricot brandy. The lecture over, we approached the podium.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?” was his first remark, when we introduced ourselves. We told him we had come to meet him. After an hour’s chat, we left, armed with tips on what to see on our North American tour, who to speak to, where to study in the United States, and a sense of privilege at having made friends with the man whose Age of the Masters had switched me on to architecture, and the possibilities of writing vividly about it.
I got to know Peter, and his wife, Mary, well in subsequent years, meeting them on both sides of the Atlantic. During a summer visit in 1983, shortly before I set sail for the East Coast myself, Banham came to address my Lonely Arts Club in my garret on Long Acre. People sat in the living room and crowded out into the narrow hall to listen enraptured as he spoke, whisky in hand, for an uninterrupted two hours on his years with the Independent Group. It seemed as if he knew everybody—the next day, I Hoovered up the dropped names along with the usual detritus of wine corks and spent matches that testified to an exceptional club event. Peter was always generous with his wit and wisdom: there was immediate rapport and a torrent of information as soon as you spoke to him. Even in hospital, these past few weeks—having been rushed home from the States as his illness rapidly worsened—he was full of new ideas, suggestions for my dissertation research, barbed comments on personalities in the world of architecture and its histories. He was reading Jean Baudrillard’s Amérique—not yet available in this country—and was obviously chuffed by the name check and reference to his book on American deserts.
I visited him in Santa Cruz, on the West Coast, at Christmas 1984 (my second winter in the States as a graduate student). He showed me round the campus where he now taught, pointing out Charles Moore’s Kresge College with his mix of enthusiasm and benevolent put-down. We went round the town—a sleepy place a bit like Bournemouth, with its low bungalows and out-of-season funfair—and took in the sights, like the cove to which surfers flock for the most challenging waves and the eucalyptus tree on which so many monarch butterflies descend during their annual migration that the branches actually droop. Trust Banham to perceive such a wonderfully preposterous example of engineering principles at work in the world of nature: the live loading of these light, ethereal creatures.
We ate french fries sitting on the pier, watching the sunset. By this point, I had remembered how pointless it was to try getting a word in edgeways: much better just to sit and listen to his ceaseless stock of tales and tongue-tickling neologisms: “Picture-skew” for picturesque, “Archie” for The Architectural Review. “Veedub” for a VW car, “R-Eleven-D” for Richard Llewelyn-Davies. That evening beside the fire, he talked of buildings and architects, of magazines and wordsmithing. “My tolerance for masterpieces is about thirty-five seconds,” he confessed. “I stood in front of the Mona Lisa for five.” He said he’d told James Stirling that he’d spent five hours at Stuttgart, and the architect was really flattered. “So you should be,” Banham reported his own retort. He reminisced about writing his dissertation, which would become the oft- reprinted Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Studying with Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion at the Courtauld, he said, “There was no doubt in my mind, these were my Great Masters and they’d got it wrong—they’d missed out De Stijl and Futurism and their influence on modern architecture. I was going to write the great revisionist history.” A look of glee spread over his face, swathed in beard, that bathful of grey and white soap bubbles. Around his neck, the signature bolo tie, customised with his AIA gold medal; in one pocket of his trousers, a brightly coloured cowboy’s handkerchief.
Ever the pioneer, the intellectual frontiersman, pushing back the borders, Banham was cheated of his reward for long years in the academic outback: he was appointed to the highest chair in architectural history, the Sheldon H. Solow Professorship at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, only last year, following the death of Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The Banhams’ bags were already packed for the move to Manhattan when his condition suddenly deteriorated in January. Philip Johnson arranged a remarkable gathering of old friends and admirers during Peter’s necessary stopover in New York. They would all much rather have come to hear his inaugural lecture, on which he was working at the time of his death.
Banham’s ambivalent relationship with the United States was that mix of fascination for mass production and industrialised popular culture, with yearnings for European culture that had previously sparked the modernists—whose own excited journeyings he recorded in A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900–1925. In many ways this book is an autobiographical elegy, in which Banham came to terms with, as he put it, “the difference between the tangible fact and the utopian vision,” the experience of place versus the preconceptions based on mediated impressions.
His description of his own coming upon the abandoned, derelict Concrete Central grain elevator is a gem of self-discovery:
Coming out on to the wharf, dominated by the three largest loose legs ever built in Buffalo, now semi-transparent as the winds of the winters had blown away more and more of their rusted corrugated cladding, it was difficult not to see everything through eighteenth-century picturesque visions of ancient sites or even Piranesi’s view of the temples of Paestum . . . I was looking at one of the great remains of a high and mighty period of constructive art in North America, a historical monument in its own inalienable right. But at a slight cultural remove, I was also . . . looking at a monument to a different civilization that had been as unknown to its builders as Christianity has been to the builders of most of the monuments in Rome: the culture of the European modern movement.
And reaching the rooftop racetrack at the Fiat Lingotto factory in Turin, Banham felt it was “a strangely disturbing and moving experience for me, a kind of historian’s homecoming for one partially Americanized European.”
So sad that his own latest homecoming should have been his last, as it was. But in his evocations of the designed environment—from “Household Godjets” and Moulton minicycles to museums and monster silos—Peter Banham lives on.