Cruising through LA in overdrive makes for a thrilling ride

摘要

Reyner Banham famously wrote that to read Los Angeles 'in the original', he had to learn to drive. In the introduction to Wim de Wit and Christopher James Alexander's new catalogue to the eponymous exhibition, Overdrive: LA Constructs the Future, 1940-1990, the editors repeat Banham's observation that the freeways, petrol stations and drive-ins of post-war LA, were - rather than aberrations - but developments of a local relationship between man and land to which transport and roads had always been integral. And, like Las Vegas, you couldn't have LA without the ads. As Banham wrote, 'the proliferation of advertising signs is an essential part of the character of Los Angeles; to deprive the city of them would be like depriving San Gimignano of its towers or the City of London of its Wren steeples'.