As has been established throughout this Dossier, the relationship between the natural and the man-made within Los Angeles is of great concern. This section will explore the fantastical commercialisation of Los Angeles as explored in some of Reyner Banham’s work within Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.
‘Los Angeles has seen in this century the greatest concentration of fantasy-production, as an industry and as an institution, in the history of Western man’[1] are the words that Banham uses to describe the city in his 1971 essay. He discusses the most popular example of this, Disneyland, which first opened in Anaheim, a city which sits on the border of Los Angeles, by stating that ‘it is an almost faultless organization for delivering, against cash, almost any type at all of environmental experience that human fancy, however inflamed’.[2] The commercialisation of the environment, through its man-made reproduction, packaging it into a consumable product for the citizens of the city, is evidence of a continued thoughtlessness towards the ground in which Los Angeles is built upon. The ground, as Chambers mentions, ‘although seemingly passive and dumb, replies’,[3] but is ignored by the citizens of the city.
<https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/07/17/disneyland-on-day-1-was-a-disaster-they-called-black-sunday.html, https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5pNlSAsjc_Q/maxresdefault.jpg, https://www.designingdisney.com/media/images/12.max-600x600_9THJFHt.jpg> [accessed 7th December 2021]
Interestingly, as shown in the images above, Disneyland’s opening day was a disaster. The weather and the ground played a significant role, with the heat ‘so intense that women’s heels were sinking into the soft asphalt'[4]. The idea of the ground responding appears to be no more apparent than in this moment, where it is quite literally trying to stop citizens from attending a commercialised recreation of the natural.
Even outside of the now globalised Disneyland, the city of Los Angeles is built upon these attractions that focus on the production of fantasy-based consumerism. Rodeo Drive, the luxurious high-fashion strip which sits just outside the picturesque neighbourhood of Beverley Hills, and Hollywood Boulevard, the heart of the motion picture, just down the road. Through a 4.6 mile (7.4km) long road full of star-studded plaques which millions step upon each year, Hollywood is an architectural fantasy, commercialised through its numerous gift shops and billboards. As Banham points out, ‘the going body of architectural fantasy is in the public, not private, domain, and constitutes almost the only public architecture in the city’.[5] Architectural fantasy overwhelms the city, it is scattered all over so that even when you can’t see it, you are still aware of its presence. As Fine describes, ‘this literal transformation of open, natural space into closed, manmade space’[6] contributes significantly to the claustrophobic and pessimistic writing that we see from Didion, Fante, and other LA writers.
The natural is ultimately forgotten about, replaced by the commercialised architectural fantasy.
[1] Reyner Banham, from Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies in Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, ed. by David L. Ulin (New York: The Library of America, 2002), 535-57 (p.548) <https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/2955079/mod_resource/content/1/LA_built_environment_essays.pdf> [accessed 5th December 2021]
[2] Banham, p.549
[3] Iain Chambers, ‘Ground’ in City A-Z, ed. by Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 93-94 (p.93) <https://moodle.brookes.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=1787700> [accessed 30th November 2021]
[4] ‘This Day in History: 07/17/1955 – Disneyland Opens’, History.com <https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/17-2-video> [accessed 8th December 2021]
[5] Banham, p.556
[6] David Fine, ‘Running out of Space: Vanishing Landscapes in California Novels’, Western American Literature, 26.3 (1991), 209-218 (p.210) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43020780> [accessed 5th December 2021]