Banham in America : A Transatlantic Dialogue

The sublime. That is what British journalist and historian Peter Reyner Banham encountered in America: the experience of the sublime while driving on the Los Angeles freeways, crossing the deserts of the West, exploring the Buffalo grain elevators, standing in front of the Tennessee Valley Authority dams. At the invitation of Philip Johnson, Banham first visited the United States in 1960, the year he also published his first book, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. He returned to the US with increasing regularity over the next 15 years for research trips and to attend the International Design Conference in Aspen, which he chaired in 1968 under the theme “Dialogues: Europe/America.” In 1976, Banham relocated from London to Buffalo to teach at SUNY-Buffalo. In 1980, he moved to California to take a position at UC Santa Cruz. And in 1987, he was appointed Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, a position he was unable to assume, as he died of cancer the following year.