The sublime that Banham encountered was not the Romantic sublime that pervaded English Grand Tour travelers when facing the Swiss Alps on the way to Italy, but rather a kind of sublime very close to that described by David Nye a few years after Banham's death in his American Technological Sublime (1994), where technological efforts do not simply bend nature to people's needs, but they become the highest form of materialization of democracy. For Banham, who hated privilege and deeply despised the classist British society, this mattered tremendously, and this is what I think ignited his enduring passion for America.I agree; Banham certainly was drawn to the "technological sublime" he found in America, but I think his passion for the US was ignited much earlier, and his reverence for such landscapes was extremely complicated.As a boy in Norwich in the 1930s, Banham devoured American movies, pulp novels, magazines, and comic books. Through his association with the Independent Group in the 1950s, he reignited his love of American pop culture. Before long, he found himself writing about car styling, American science-fiction films, commercial brand marks, even potato chips.
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