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“... 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 ...”

“... 1960, in an article for the Architects’ Journal – ‘I’d crawl a mile for … Playboy’ – Reyner Banham claimed he only read it for the architecture and design. ‘Playboy over the years has discussed and illustrated quite a lot of furniture,’ he wrote in the magazine’s defence, arguing that it had done more for design in the US than House ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... less-known masters such as H.T. Cadbury-Brown or Rodney Gordon, but is less keen on it as theory. Reyner Banham comes in for atypically unfair disdain (both ‘hep-cat’ and ‘after-dinner speaker’). He’s more on the mark in his account of Alison and Peter Smithson as mediocre designers and spectacular self-promoters. But what if the ...”

“... focused study, he means to start us thinking about Pop now and then. It is a reference to Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), which argued that modernism’s prewar optimism was over and done. ‘We have already entered the Second Machine Age,’ Banham declared, ‘and can look ...”

“... all the impression one gets from the earliest accounts of the style. The book that defined it was Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, published in 1966. Banham’s account, which recapitulated an essay written for the Architectural Review in 1955, was on one level an exemplary piece of Cold War ...”