Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies  by Reyner
Banham Harper & Row, 256 pp., $6.95  Reyner Banham’s book is a
lighthearted and affectionate tribute to Los Angeles. That’s
right, Los Angeles, everybody’s favorite horrible example,
Mumford’s “anti-city,” Reaganland, the Ur-city of the plastic
culture, of Kustom-Kars and movie stars, nutburgers and Mayor
Yorty and The Monkees, the Dream Factory, fantasy land, Watts
and the barrio, glass and stucco-built, neon-lit, chrome-plated,
formica-topped Los Angeles, schlockhaus of the Western world,
where the pursuit of pleasure has become a way of life, auto-
ridden, freeway-scarred, smog-choked Los Angeles, fortress city
on the desert from whence each weekend the denizens spill out in
their great belching machines to pollute the countryside.
Banham, Professor of the History of Architecture at University
College, London, discovered Los Angeles in the 1960s when it was
already what it is today, a city of just under three million
people occupying the central ch