Birmingham: The Architecture of Two Ecologies (2015)

This study took Reyner Banham’s 1971 book ‘Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies’, and re-situated it forty-four years later in Birmingham, England. It engaged with Banham’s text in both form and method; inserting, as Anthony Vidler described, ‘one into the other in a kind of montage’. These positions stretched across the past and present, across different sites and situations, and, Vidler continues, ‘instigate pauses for reflection and reviewing; as if the historian were circling around his objects of study, viewing them through different frames, and different scales, and from different vantage points’.

The study wanted to know what Birmingham becomes through Banham’s Los Angeles; and in turn, what we might understand of Banham, his Los Angeles, and his method, through Birmingham.

It took Banham’s lead in his idea that an urban architectural history should be more than the sum of its architectural parts; that it is the cultural flotsam and jetsam, the hot-dog stands, the sidewalks, the underlying geology, the myths, and the people, that inform our understanding of a local culture and what makes somewhere what it is.

You can read the text here.