i was most disappointed with Max Neufeld’s review in NLR 6 of Reyner Banham’s new book. It amazes me that in a humanist journal an architect can accept with only a few minor reservations a profoundly mechanistic interpretation of our environment.
Banham’s title, Theory And Design In The First Machine Age; is not just an example of his deplorable use of jargon; it begs at least four large questions. Was the period 1900–1930 the most significant “age” in modern architecture? Was it a “machine age” different in kind from previous decades of the Industrial Revolution? Was it the “first” machine age? Above all, can one write an adequate history of modern architecture, as Neufeld seems to agree, which only starts in 1900, with Gropius, Le Corbusier and Lloyd Wright?