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“... The Great Chasm of the Colorado’, as awe-struck admirers of the Sublime used to call it, is one of the unquestioned show-pieces of North American geology. The word ‘show-piece’ seems appropriate because the Grand Canyon, to give it the name canonised by the advertising of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, is a kind of permanent media-event whose skilful presentation to the viewing public is almost as important as the substance of its topography ...”

“... It was Nugent Monck, perennial director of the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich, who first set me to reading Doughty’s desert monsterpiece. The ostensible reason was our glee at discovering Henry Reed’s poem about the ‘rose red sissy half as old as time’, which reads remarkably like a description of Monck himself, and which prompted him to direct my attention to the description of the rose-red city of Petra of the Nabataeans in Doughty’s second chapter ...”

“... Tom Wolfe’s earlier squib against Modernism, The Painted Word, was a reasonable succès de scandale among those with enough interest in the New York School of painting to want to defend it, but went little further than that. From Bauhaus to Our House, on the other hand, has achieved the unprecedented feat (in architectural publishing) of making its way, albeit briefly, into the American best-seller lists, along with all those diets, cats and Barbara Cartland ...”

“... In the travel-starved Fifties, when the journey was often more glamorous than the destination. Sir Hugh Casson began one of his Observer articles: ‘As the airport bus rolled along Chelsea Embankment, I looked up and saw a light burning late in the study of the architectural correspondent of the Times. No doubt he was writing, “Sir Hugh Casson, whose death in an air accident …” ’ A good Cassonian ploy ...”

“... Reyner Banham was as smart and sassy as any critic in the postwar period. What made him distinctive was his passion for the edgiest expressions of his technological age, not only in avant-garde architecture but in anything designed – Cadillacs and transistor radios, custom hot-rods and painted surfboards, gadgets and gizmos; all of which he discussed with great verve in 12 books and over 700 articles ...”

“... Even if you enjoy Southern California as much as Reyner Banham you may still, like him, draw the line at those discreetly fenced-in and fortified cities in which the better-off sometimes choose to live, and at whose gates the visitor must check with the guardians before being allowed to enter. I recently spent a few days in one of these suburban paradises ...”

“... like chess, no matter how spirited the new games, the best openings are already in the books. Reyner Banham, fly and knowing as well as scholarly and knowledgeable, casts himself as the buff, the freak, the aficionado. His great gifts to architectural history have been alternative stories. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, he pointed to ...”

“... and working within it – remains debatable. Hatherley is ostensibly a critic in the mode of Reyner Banham: freewheeling, spinning out ideas, theories and evaluations that may have their origin in the stony core of the built environment, but which spread to encompass most other aesthetic realms as well. Aesthetic but in Hatherley’s case also ...”

“... of the science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet, opened the show because, according to the critic Reyner Banham, he was much ‘easier to book than Marilyn Monroe’. Banham wrote an essay, in the form of concrete poetry, for the accompanying catalogue, which was designed by IG member Edward Wright (who went on to ...”

“... Price’s giant unbuilt Fun Palace in the East End of London, the graphic visions of Archigram, Reyner Banham’s celebration of the ‘aesthetics of expendability’ and Colin Rowe’s arguments for collage and the reinstatement of the ‘leftovers of the world’ within wider urban design. For their part, civic activists and urban thinkers such as ...”

“... a movie to give The Fountainhead more than a run for its money. In A Concrete AtlantisReyner Banham is back picking at the architectural wallpaper to find out what was papered over. The patch he has chosen looks too small to cover anything dramatic: his subject is the 14 illustrations of American grain elevators and factories which Walter ...”

“... William Turnbull and Magda Cordell, the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, and the critic Reyner Banham. In the late 1980s the Smithsons looked back on the ‘as found’ aesthetic of New Brutalism as ‘a confronting recognition of what the postwar world actually was like’: ‘In a society that had nothing you reached for what there ...”

“... relics (it looked as though it had been ‘excavated after the atomic holocaust’, the critic Reyner Banham remarked). On the proto-Pop side of the IG were Hamilton, John McHale and the architect John Voelcker, who contrived a fairground ‘crazy house’ on the theme of the new sensorium produced by mass media; among other images and objects, it ...”

“... of what post-industrial design might look like (‘most of us want it to look like something,’ Reyner Banham once remarked; ‘we don’t want form to follow function into oblivion’). In this regard the Beaubourg was not as far-out as the ‘clip-on’ and ‘plug-in’ idiom of Archigram, with its ‘visually wild rich mess of piping and wiring and ...”

“... architecture: Le Corbusier concluded Vers une architecture (1923) with images of the track, and Reyner Banham hailed it in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) as ‘the most nearly Futurist building ever built’. Tellingly, Piano has now fitted this old factory with a helicopter pad, a glass bubble conference room for company ...”