Los Angeles

is a city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep.

A city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a small downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of ancientry, Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape.

is instant architecture in an instant townscape. Most of its buildings are the first and only structures on their particular parcels of land... they are couched in a dozen different styles, most of them imported, exploited, and ruined within living memory. Yet the city has a comprehensible, even consistent, quality to its built form, unified enough to rank as a fit subject for an historical monograph.

A city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a small downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of ancientry, Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape. Most of its buildings are the first and only structures on their particular parcels of land... they are couched in a dozen different styles, most of them imported, exploited, and ruined within living memory. Yet the city has a comprehensible, even consistent, quality to its built form, unified enough to rank as a fit subject for an historical monograph.

is without urban form and so is in no way wrecked by parking-lots, freeways, drive-ins, and other facilities.

The fact that these parking-lots, freeways, drive-ins, and other facilities have not wrecked the city-form is due chiefly to the fact that Los Angeles has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense. Ibid. BANHAM, Reyner (1922 )

Reyner Benham

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