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Reyner Banham (1922-88) http://tinyurl.com/Banhan

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Coming In From Outdoors

From Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971.

Reader: Daniel Maloney

Well before the cell phone complicated our driving lives, the make-up mirror was a vehicular distraction nearly as infamous and nearly as pregnant with symbolic portent.

Architectural historian Reyner Banham recognized that it wasn't the actual function of that little mirror on the back side or our sun-visor that was important. It was what its use implied about our lives as citizens of "autopia."

An aerial photo from March 29, 2004 of the Interstate 405/California State Highway 19 interchange near Los Angeles, California, a modified cloverleaf interchange. Larger.

The first time I saw it happen nothing registered on my conscious mind, because it all seemed so natural—as the car in front turned down the off-ramp of the San Diego freeway, the girl beside the driver pulled down the sun-visor and used the mirror on the back of it to tidy her hair. Only when I had seen a couple more incidents of the kind did I catch their import: that coming off the freeway is coming in from outdoors. A domestic or sociable journey in Los Angeles does not end so much at the door of one's destination as at the off-ramp of the feeway, the mile or two of ground-level streets counts as no more than the front drive of the house.

Reyner Banham published his classic study, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, in 1971.