Los Angeles Freeways as Cultural Text in Banham, Babitz and Didion

Reyner Banham's 1971 book 'Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies' provides a structural analysis of the city's development through infrastructure like water grids and railroads, which later shaped its freeway system. Eve Babitz's 1977 work 'Slow Days, Fast Company' and Joan Didion's 1970 novel 'Play It As It Lays' both use Los Angeles freeways as central narrative devices, with Didion's character Maria Wyeth finding the freeway absorbing all her attention. Banham's diagrams originally labeled freeways with destination names like 'Hollywood Freeway' and 'Santa Monica Freeway', while contemporary usage has shifted to numerical designations like 'the 101' and 'the 405'. This evolution reflects changing relationships to geography and movement in Los Angeles, where freeways once connected to specific places but now represent algorithmic patterns of daily commuting. The article originally appeared in ArtReview's December 2016 issue, examining how three different writers captured distinct eras of Los Angeles consciousness through transportation infrastructure.