Former UB Fellow releases Banham-inspired book

A newly released book titled Reyner Banham: A Set of Actual Tracks was edited by Ludovico Centis, former Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning (2013-14). The Banham Fellowship is intended to support design work that situates architecture within the general field of socio-cultural and material critique.

This book brings a contemporary critical lens to the work of Reyner Banham, one of the most prescient architectural and design critics of the 20th century. Banham taught at UB from 1976-80 and spent his time in Buffalo engaged in a scholarly project on the imagery of American industrial architecture at work in early modernism, resulting in his landmark work, A Concrete Atlantis.

In Reyner Banham: A Set of Actual Tracks, 16 of the acerbic historian’s essays and book chapters have been selected by contributors, ranging from classics such as The Great Gizmo to lesser-known texts such as The Wall, an intimate confession he penned in hospital shortly before his death. Each is accompanied by a contemporary response that contextualizes Banham’s writing, drawing out reflections on what the critic’s work means today.

“Indeed, my time as Banham fellow in 2013-14 proved to be relevant in the frame of my extended research on the British historian’s intellectual legacy,” Centis said. “More than this, UB’s School of Architecture and Planning has always been very supportive of my research activities in subsequent years, as the seminar I taught between 2018-2019 and the following symposium and exhibition titled ‘They must have enjoyed building here: Reyner Banham and Buffalo,’ inaugurated in September 2019 testify.”