Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Two pioneering works of radical television from the mind of the iconoclastic architecture critic Reyner Banham.

The writings and thinking of Reyner Banham, born 100 years ago this year, came to define and create architectural culture. His hugely innovative and engaging analyses of architecture, the city, culture and its artefacts continue to mark generations.

Banham’s trademark formal and intellectual wit, invention and creative critique found a perfect home on TV. In tonight’s first episode he drives the streets of his beloved LA, aided by an Alexa-like technological tour guide. In the second, he departs from there for Las Vegas, finding his own personal jackpot in the desert landscapes on route.

The ScreenTalk is chaired by Professor Richard J Williams, author of Reyner Banham Revisited, with guests writer and journalist Owen Hatherley, architectural historian Adrian Forty and LA-based critic, editor and curator Mimi Zeiger.

Peter Reyner Banham is one of the most relevant architectural and design critics of the 20th century. Join us to celebrate his 100th birthday on March 4 with a symposium, organised as a collaboration between the AA and The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, which will bring together multi-generational duets of scholars and practitioners engaging on themes key to the life and intellectual legacy of the English critic.

The symposium will precede two AA Visiting Schools held from June-July 2022 – “Farewell Reveries” (online) and “A Blighty Safari” (a road trip throughout the UK) – that will reflect on Banham’s passion for travel and field exploration.

Original image by Tim Street-Porter

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Las Vegas plays so much better on the page than in person. In concept, Vegas is an escape, a desert playground, but reality can never match the fantasy. Prose lubricates, distances actuality, and forms a glow around dubious experience in the same way that three miniatures of Southern Comfort loosen up a seatmate on the 45-minute flight from Burbank to McCarran International Airport. Writings arch towards hyperbole in an attempt to capture decades of spectacle that rise on the Strip, neon-trimmed, already pulsing with lurid symbology: spires, pyramids, Venetian canals. 

A text, even Learning from Las Vegas with its embrace of populist architecture through modalities of analytical abstraction, shields a reader from the perfume of weed, vomit and tropical air freshener in the back of an Uber. The actual experience of Vegas is an exercise in searching fervently for some kind of authenticity, some kind of fun, only to be frustrated, haunted and impoverished by the tawdry glee of nickel slots and an all-you-can-eat buffet.  

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Joar Nango’s identity as Sámi, the Indigenous people of northern Europe, is central to his art and architecture practice. Yet in terms of discipline or medium, he actively defies categorization, choosing instead to mobilize the space in-between and across worlds. This is partly to find breathing room within his creative practice and partly political stance — strategic evasion as post-capitalist critique. Through site-specific installations, video, and zines, Nango actively investigates intersections between Indigenous and contemporary architectures, traditional Sámi construction, and new media. The results have a way of escaping the present; instead, they create a kind of feedback loop between past and future architectural narratives. 

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If there was any lingering doubt that Brutalism — the architectural style derided for everything the name implies — was back in fashion, the “Atlas of Brutalist Architecture” quashes it with a monumental thump. At 560 pages representing some 878 works of architecture in over 100 countries, the outsize volume is part reference tool, part coffee table book, and certainly part of an ongoing design trend favoring big, big books.

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Sometime in the early 1980s, Reyner Banham looked out across a stretch of Arizona landscape—a dry wash and long mound of earth scattered with trash. “[A]mong the chollas and cacti there are areas of burned ash, holes containing broken porcelain insulators and what may be pieces of toilet fitting, broken china and other domestic detritus; and areas of compacted ground that might have been the sites of small  buildings,” he later wrote in Scenes in America Deserta as the opening to a chapter entitled “Frank Lloyd Wright Country.” Read More …

Almost every Angelino has a dingbat story. It might be a tale of love and loss in a sixties-era apartment complex or a joke about a friend who lived in stucco box in West L.A. with “stoner” scrawled across the façade in fancy script. Dignbats are such a common multifamily building type that we almost forget about them, even though they crop up everywhere across the Los Angeles basin. They are neighborhood infill noted by such keen observers of the built environment as Ed Ruscha and architecture historian Reyner Banham but rarely celebrated. Read More …

The Petersen Automotive Museum only reopened yesterday, but connoisseurs of Wilshire Boulevard architecture have been jawing about the eye-popping facade for months. Ever since a carapace of red steel ribbons started to appear, bending around the corner of Fairfax and arcing over the roof of the former Seibu department store, the structure designed by Kohn Pederson Fox has drawn pointed criticism.

Garbage. Obnoxious. Hideous. The Edsel of architecture. Facadism.

And ever since red LED lights were installed along the edge of each ribbon, turning every component of the facade into an undercarriage worthy of a Vin Diesel vehicle, we can add “traffic hazard” to the list. But is it enough to point out the offensive and offer revved up reproach – a model of critique custom-made for our digital lives? After the retorts cool, the museum opens, and we have to live with the eyesore, one wonders if KFP’s design offers any lessons for our architectural now?

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On a hot October evening I stood on the front walk of Greene and Greene’s Gamble House in Pasadena and watched a puppet crane poke his beak through the center of what can only be described as an Arts and Crafts vortex. A nearly 30-foot-wide sculpture hung from the street façade, patterned in a hallucinogenic, Morris-style rose motif. The crane and rose are, of course, the Gamble family crest. Its author, artist Patrick Ballard, calls it The Swirling Mess Below the Sleeping Porch Soon Solidified into a Crest of Phantasmagoric Weight that Creaks Between the Doors, the Floors, and a Form that Could Never Be a House Again. Read More …