Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972) is a 50-minute film devoted to exploring the British architectural historian’s love affair with this uniquely American city. Banham roams the “four ecologies” of Los Angeles—beach, freeways, foothills, and basin—first presented in his 1971 book, with the playful assistance of “Baede-Kar” (an 8-track audio tour that parodies the 19th century German guidebooks published by Karl Baedeker). Along the way, he tours the Watts Towers, riffs on Googie architecture with artist Ed Ruscha, visits the unusual characters of Venice Beach, and meanders the highways with a giddy enthusiasm that knowingly celebrates the city’s sprawl and indecipherability, the very qualities derided by conventional critics of architecture and urbanism. The combination of Banham’s passion for history and pop culture and the film’s period footage, music, and cameos with local personalities makes for an entertaining and insightful tour through 1970s Los Angeles.

This film is presented in conjunction with the Graham-funded exhibition The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, 1960-1980 on view at Art Institute of Chicago through January 11 and opening at the Princeton University Art Museum February 21. The screening will include introductory remarks by exhibition curators Alison Fisher and Greg Foster-Rice.

Alison Fisher is Harold and Margot Schiff Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. With a focus on heterodox histories of modern architecture and urbanism, she has curated numerous exhibitions including the retrospective Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention (2011-12).  She is the co-curator of The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, 1960-1980.

Greg Foster-Rice is an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches the history, theory and criticism of photography. He has published extensively on the relationship of photographic media to the built environment, including co-editing and co-authoring the anthology Reframing the New Topographics (2011). He is the co-curator of The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, 1960-1980.

Image: "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles," 1972.