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21-531: Peter Reyner Banham (2 March 1922 – 19 March 1988) was an English architectural critic and writer best known for his theoretical treatise Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and for his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies . In the latter he categorized the Los Angeles experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored

42-805: A 'modern' future. In A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900–1925 (1986) Banham demonstrated the influence of American grain elevators and "Daylight" factories on the Bauhaus and other modernist projects in Europe. Banham was a prolific journalist (of some 750 articles), both within and outside of the architectural press, including regular columns in New Statesman (1958–1963) and New Society (1966-1988). Selections of his journalism articles were collected in Design by Choice , edited by Penny Sparke and A Critic Writes (which includes

63-709: A critical biography of Banham, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future , in which he gives an in-depth overview of Banham's work and ideas. Treatise The word "treatise" has its origins in the early 14th century, derived from the Anglo-French term tretiz , which itself comes from the Old French traitis , meaning "treatise" or "account." This Old French term is rooted in the verb traitier , which means "to deal with" or "to set forth in speech or writing". The etymological lineage can be traced further back to

84-839: A full bibliography), edited by his wife Mary Banham and others. Banham taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture , University College London (1964–1976) and the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo (1976–1980), and through the 1980s at the University of California, Santa Cruz . He had been appointed the Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University shortly before his death, but he never taught there. In 2014 The Bartlett established

105-586: A named chair appointment of the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory. He was featured in the short documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles ; in his book on Los Angeles, Banham said that he learned to drive so he could read the city in the original. In 1988 he was awarded the Sir Misha Black award and was added to the College of Medallists . In 2003, Nigel Whiteley published

126-575: The Architectural Review in 1952. Notably in its December 1955 issue, Banham contributed an essay titled "The New Brutalism", in which he sought to stylistically define New Brutalism . His hypotheses became widely discussed and debated topics among members of Team X and other groups involved in urban planning at the time. Banham also had connections with the Independent Group , the 1956 This Is Tomorrow art exhibition – considered by many to

147-548: The Archigram group also found this to be an absorbing arena of thought. Green thinking ( Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies ) and then the oil shock of 1973 affected him. The ' postmodern ' was for him uneasy, and he evolved into becoming the conscience of postwar British architecture. He broke with utopian and technical formalism . Scenes in America Deserta (1982) talks of open spaces and his anticipation of

168-461: The Latin word tractatus , which is a form of the verb tractare , meaning "to handle," "to manage," or "to deal with". The Latin roots suggest a connotation of engaging with or discussing a subject in depth, which aligns with the modern understanding of a treatise as a formal and systematic written discourse on a specific topic. The works presented here have been identified as influential by scholars on

189-533: The Masters, a Personal View of Modern Architecture ). Banham predicted a "second age" of the machine and mass consumption . The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969) follows Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command (1948), putting the development of technologies such as electricity and air conditioning ahead of the classic account of structures. In the 1960s, Cedric Price , Peter Cook , and

210-501: The birth of pop art – and the exponents of Brutalist architecture , which he documented in his 1966 book The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? . Before this, in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age , he had cut across mentor Pevsner's main theories, linking modernism to build structures in which the ' functionalism ' was actually subject to formal structures. Later, he wrote a Guide to Modern Architecture (1962, later titled Age of

231-817: The development of human civilization. Euclid's Elements has appeared in more editions than any other books except the Bible and is one of the most important mathematical treatises ever. It has been translated to numerous languages and remains continuously in print since the beginning of printing. Before the invention of the printing press, it was manually copied and widely circulated. When scholars recognized its excellence, they removed inferior works from circulation in its favor. Many subsequent authors, such as Theon of Alexandria , made their own editions, with alterations, comments, and new theorems or lemmas. Many mathematicians were influenced and inspired by Euclid's masterpiece. For example, Archimedes of Syracuse and Apollonius of Perga ,

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252-693: The distinct architectural cultures of each. A frequent visitor to the United States from the early 1960s, he relocated there in 1976. [Peter] Reyner Banham was born in Norwich , England to Percy Banham, a gas engineer, and Violet Frances Maud Reyner. He was educated at Norwich School and gained an engineering scholarship with the Bristol Aeroplane Company , where he spent much of the Second World War. In Norwich he gave art lectures, wrote reviews for

273-513: The geometry of three-dimensional objects such as polyhedra), number theory, and the theory of proportions. It was essentially a compilation of all mathematics known to the Greeks up until Euclid's time. Drawing on the work of his predecessors, especially the experimental research of Michael Faraday , the analogy with heat flow by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and the mathematical analysis of George Green , James Clerk Maxwell synthesized all that

294-427: The greatest mathematicians of their time, received their training from Euclid's students and his Elements and were able to solve many open problems at the time of Euclid. It is a prime example of how to write a text in pure mathematics, featuring simple and logical axioms, precise definitions, clearly stated theorems, and logical deductive proofs. The Elements consists of thirteen books dealing with geometry (including

315-741: The local paper and was involved with the Maddermarket Theatre . In 1949 Banham entered the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where he studied under Anthony Blunt , Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner . Pevsner, who was his doctoral supervisor, invited Banham to study the history of modern architecture, following his own work Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). Having previously written regular exhibition reviews for ArtReview , then titled Art News and Review, Banham began working for

336-461: The phenomenon of light dispersion where other models failed. John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) and Josiah Willard Gibbs then proved that the optical equations derived from Maxwell's theory are the only self-consistent description of the reflection, refraction, and dispersion of light consistent with experimental results. Optics thus found a new foundation in electromagnetism . Hertz's experimental work in electromagnetism stimulated interest in

357-513: The possibility of wireless communication, which did not require long and expensive cables and was faster than even the telegraph. Guglielmo Marconi adapted Hertz's equipment for this purpose in the 1890s. He achieved the first international wireless transmission between England and France in 1900 and by the following year, he succeeded in sending messages in Morse code across the Atlantic. Seeing its value,

378-473: The shipping industry adopted this technology at once. Radio broadcasting became extremely popular in the twentieth century and remains in common use in the early twenty-first. But it was Oliver Heaviside , an enthusiastic supporter of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, who deserves most of the credit for shaping how people understood and applied Maxwell's work for decades to come; he was responsible for considerable progress in electrical telegraphy, telephony, and

399-493: The study of the propagation of electromagnetic waves. Independent of Gibbs, Heaviside assembled a set of mathematical tools known as vector calculus to replace the quaternions , which were in vogue at the time but which Heaviside dismissed as "antiphysical and unnatural." Bartlett School of Architecture Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include

420-423: Was confirmed by Heinrich Hertz . In the process, Hertz generated and detected what are now called radio waves and built crude radio antennas and the predecessors of satellite dishes. Hendrik Lorentz derived, using suitable boundary conditions, Fresnel's equations for the reflection and transmission of light in different media from Maxwell's equations. He also showed that Maxwell's theory succeeded in illuminating

441-553: Was known about electricity and magnetism into a single mathematical framework, Maxwell's equations . Originally, there were 20 equations in total. In his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), Maxwell reduced them to eight. Maxwell used his equations to predict the existence of electromagnetic waves, which travel at the speed of light. In other words, light is but one kind of electromagnetic wave. Maxwell's theory predicted there ought to be other types, with different frequencies. After some ingenious experiments, Maxwell's prediction

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