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A collection of essays by leading critics who are inspired by Reyner Banham's revolutionary work. Each critic presents their own analysis of a key issue in design, architecture or art. The essays explore topics such as: clothes and carpets, photography, the history of bedrooms, how cities grow, the architecture of museums, dematerialisation and the future of design.
Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham’s writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham’s habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham’s early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the “clip-on” approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of “well-tempered environments” fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late-career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano. Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham’s late work, including fresh archival materials related to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech, the manuscript he left unfinished at his death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham’s previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.
Reyner Banham (1922–88) was a prolific, iconoclastic critic of modern architecture, cities, and mass culture in Britain and the United States, and his provocative writings are inescapable in these areas. His 1971 book on Los Angeles was groundbreaking in what it told Californians about their own metropolis, and architects about what cities might be if freed from tradition. Banham’s obsession with technology, and his talent for thinking the unthinkable, mean his work still resonates now, more than thirty years after his death. This book explores the full breadth of his career and his legacy, dealing not only with his major books, but a wide range of his journalism and media outputs, as well as the singular character of Banham himself.
A critical overview of contemporary design and its place within the broader context of art history A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945 introduces readers to a collection of specially commissioned essays exploring the complex areas of design that emerged through the latter half of the twentieth century, design history, design methods, design studies and more recently, design thinking. The book delivers a thoughtful overview of all design disciplines and also strives to stimulate inter-disciplinary debate and examine unconsidered convergences among design applications in different fields. By offering a new perspective on design, the articles assembled here present a challenging account of the boundaries between design history and its cognate disciplines, especially art history. The volume comprises five sections—Time, Place, Space, Objects and Audiences—that discuss environments for design and how we interact with designed objects and spaces. Notable features include: 24 new essays reflecting the current state of design history and theory, and examining developments on a global basis Contributions by eminent scholars and practitioners from around the globe Enriched throughout with illustrations A Companion to Contemporary Design since 1945 provides a new and thought-provoking revision of our conception and understanding of contemporary design that will be essential reading for students at both undergraduate and graduate levels as well as researchers and teachers working in design history, theory and practice, and in related fields.
The title Archigram came from the notion of a more simple and urgent item than a Journal, like a telegram or aerogramme - hence, "archi(tecture)-gram."".
In 1963, British inventor Alex Moulton (1920-2012) introduced an innovative compact bicycle. Architectural Review editor Reyner Banham (1922-1988) predicted it would give rise to "a new class of cyclists," young urbanites riding by choice, not necessity. Forced to sell his firm in 1967, Moulton returned in the 1980s with an even more radical model, the AM--his acclaim among technology and design historians owed much to Banham's writings. The AM's price tag (some models cost many thousands of dollars) has inspired tech-savvy cyclists to create "hot rod" compact bikes from Moulton-inspired "shopper" cycles of the 1970s--a trend also foreseen by Banham, who considered hot rod culture the "folk art of the mechanical era." The author traces the intertwined lives of two unusually creative men who had an extraordinary impact on each others' careers, despite having met only a few times.
The history of modern architecture as constructed by historians and key texts. Writing, according to Panayotis Tournikiotis, has always exerted a powerful influence on architecture. Indeed, the study of modern architecture cannot be separated from a fascination with the texts that have tried to explain the idea of a new architecture in a new society. During the last forty years, the question of the relationship of architecture to its history—of buildings to books—has been one of the most important themes in debates about the course of modern architecture. Tournikiotis argues that the history of modern architecture tends to be written from the present, projecting back onto the past our current concerns, so that the "beginning" of the story really functions as a "representation" of its end. In this book the buildings are the quotations, while the texts are the structure. Tournikiotis focuses on a group of books by major historians of the twentieth century: Nikolaus Pevsner, Emil Kaufmann, Sigfried Giedion, Bruno Zevi, Leonardo Benevolo, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Reyner Banham, Peter Collins, and Manfredo Tafuri. In examining these writers' thoughts, he draws on concepts from critical theory, relating architecture to broader historical models.
A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike. It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains--decades after its codification--more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type. Banham, among the most gifted and incisive architectural critics and historians of his time, sought connections between theoretical origins in Le Corbusier's more starry-eyed drawings to the flurry of theories by the Japanese Metabolist architects, to less intentional examples in military architecture, industry, infrastructure, and the emerging instances in pop culture and art. Had he written the book a few years later he would find an abundance of examples in speculative art and science fiction cinema, mediums where it continues to provoke wonder to this day. A long-sought study by an author who combined imagination, wit, and pioneering scholarship, the republication of Megastructure is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople alike to return to the origins of this fantastic urban idea.