Banham and his Bubble

Momus on Reyner Banham, my favourite beard wearing pop artist, architectural historian and occasional practitioner (the 'Environment Bubble', which you can see him and his beard sat in above). There are so many things about Banham that endear him to me: the wit (an extremely rare thing in an architectural writer: lovely sentences like 'I learned to drive to read Los Angeles in the original'), the attempt to place Futurism rather than Platonism as the spring from which Modernism emerged, the coinage and prosleytising on behalf of The New Brutalism (now there's a book that needs reissuing), and the hymn to the romanticism of the grain silo in his A Concrete Atlantis...but must dissent from Momus' characterisation of Banham as 'pomo'. Not only was he enormously scathing about the 80s 'return to masonry and historical reference, seeing it a return of what he called 'the Swedish retreat from Modern architecture' way back in the '50s, even his most perverse, Warholian work implied a forward motion, the very thing which made pomo so sniffy.