“Deserves to be read today not for its prescience or as a quaint historical artifact but as a model for how to read any city.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A lighthearted and affectionate tribute.” -The New York Review of Books
Reyner Banham examined the built environment of Los Angeles in a way no architectural historian before him had done, looking with fresh eyes at its manifestations of popular taste and industrial ingenuity, as well as its more traditional modes of residential and commercial building. His construct of “four ecologies” explores the ways Angelenos relate to the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills. Banham delighted in this mobile city and identified it as an exemplar of the posturban future.
