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for the International Style amongst affluent Westsiders with the same zeal that Land of Sunshine had once advocated the Mission Revival. Indeed, John Entenza, Arts and Architecture's editor/publisher (1940-62), was transfixed with a Miesian vision of Wilshire Boulevard and the Hollywood Hills every bit as compelling as Lummiss Craftsman ideal of the Arroyo and Pasadena. From his case-study home in Santa Monica Canyon (the Westsides El Alisal), Entenza presided over a latter-day salon that included such important local design pundits as Peter Krasnow, Charles Eames and Alvin Lustig. Any perusal of Arts and Architecture's 1950s files reveals the extent to which architectural and design Modernism became emblematic of a Westside cultural divide separating new money from old, Jew from Gentile, transplanted New Yorker from hereditary Pasadenan. In this period of crosstown KulturkampJ, while Joan Didion was distilling her most dyspeptic imagery, a visiting British design historian, Reyner Banham, was penning the first serious celebration of the city since the booster days of the 1920s. Chief ideologue of the 1950s British independent Group - the midwife to the Pop Art explosion of the 1960s - Banham had once defined Pop as a firing squad without mercy or reprieve against hieratic art traditions.1 4 1 From this perspective, Southern California, with its aggressive Present-mindedness, was a land purified by an exemplary design terror.142 Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (1971) found virtue in almost everything disdained by traditional critics, including the automobile,143 surfboards, hillside homes, and something called Los Angeles architecture. Rejecting the Exiles criterion of comparability with classical urban space, Banham claimed that Los Angeless polymorphous landscapes and architectures were given a comprehensible unity by the freeway grid in a metropolis that spoke the language of movement, not monument. He found the citys essential dream - the dream of the urban homestead . . . the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside - a sympathetic ecology for architecture and excoriated the elitism of critics who failed to consult the actual desires of the masses. Lest anyone mistake the punchline of his book, Banham also made a companion BBC television documentary, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1972). The effect of Banhams intervention was quite extraordinary. Supported by his own brilliant prose, as well as by a new aesthetic climate

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