‘Of Longitude, Latitude and Zenith’
The Acoustic City
Jovis, Berlin, 2015
eds. Matthew Gandy & B. J. Nilsen
ISBN: 978 3868592 71 9

Writing in 1971, Reyner Banham suggested that one of the many reasons that the culture of Los Angeles was remarkable, and worthy of celebration, was that its aesthetic sensibility was driven by unconventional approaches to creativity that were not so evident elsewhere. Citing the city’s custom car phenomenon as one example of a vernacular culture that emerged from ‘delinquent origins,’ Banham marvelled at the ‘wonders wrought in backyards by high-school dropouts’ offering up for the public gaze vehicles that were transformed into ‘wild extravaganzas of richly coloured and exotically shaped metal.’ But as interesting as the car was to understanding the human ecology of Los Angeles, it is in the backyard that creativity often begins […]