the architect as hot-rodder...

i discovered this image of the eames house in reyner banham's 1962 "guide to modern architecture". i'd never seen this image before, with charles' notations referencing a manufacturer's standard window sizes (the house was mainly built without any custom materials)... it's certainly a beautiful thing... (and one more potential score?).

banham has a special way of writing about architecture, as you can see here by his description of eames and the eames house: to many thinking men, frank lloyd wright was never the all-american architect of his own image of himself. he never appeared as much at ease in the real america as in the america of some splendid usonian dream, and - in some curious ways - he trailed a whiff of the european meisterschule of the high romantic period. charles eames, for all his internationalism and lack of whitmanesque ham, is as american as cambell soup. for all his love of things european and oriental he handles power tools and catalogued components like a hot-rodder born, and his own house, spare and elegant, square and ineloquent, is american like a shaker chair or a trestle bridge."