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"[Los Angeles
should be] one of the most open books in the history of city-making....[but]
there are many who do not wish to read the book, and would like
to prevent others from doing so; they have soundly-based fears
about what might happen if the secrets of the Southern Californian
metropolis were too profanely opened and made plain. Los Angeles
threatens the intellectual repose and professional livelihood
of many architects, artists, planners, and environmentalists
because it breaks the rules of urban design that they promulgate
in works and writings and teach to their students. In so far
as Los Angeles performs the functions of a great city, in terms
of size, cosmopolitan style, creative energy, international
influence, distinctive way of life and corporate personality...to
the extent that Los Angeles has these qualities, then to that
same extent all the most admired theorists of the present century,
from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl
Moholoy-Nagy, have been wrong. The notion that certain densities
of population, and certain physical forms of structure are essential
to the working of a great city...must be to that same extent
false."
--Reyner Banham. Los Angeles: Architecture
of the Four Ecologies (1971).
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