Scenes in America Deserta - Softcover

Banham, Reyner

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0500272786 ISBN 13: 9780500272787

Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1984

Synopsis

'I LOOK AT THE MOJAVE and scratch my head', writes Reyner Banham in Scenes in America Deserta, not in his customary role as an architectural historian, but as a 'desert freak', a delighted, intrigued but puzzled visitor to the arid lands of the American Southwest. What delights him is the scenery, from the Big Country of Wyoming to the alkali flats of Death Valley, landscapes of staring sunlight and luminous mists, grudging oases and drought-resistant creosote bushes. What intrigues him are the works of man: the ancient pueblos and the modern observatories, the fantasies of Las Vegas and the Spanish missions, Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri. What puzzles him is his own response: the discovery that the desert is beautiful in his eyes in a way that no other landscape had ever been, a discovery which sends him in search of an explanation in the works of Gaston Bachelard, Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, early historians and explorers and the 'two giant figures from the past who have supervised my writings': the American solitary and aesthete John van Dyke, author of the classic Tbe Desert, and Charles M. Doughty, the English Arabist, author of Travels in Arabia Deserta. REYNER BANHAM, whose books include such classics as Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Los Angeles, and Megastructure, published by Thames and Hudson, is presently Professor of Art History at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Bannister Fletcher Visiting Professor in Architectural History at the University of London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Ltd
• Publication date: 1984
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0500272786
• ISBN 13: 9780500272787
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228