Banham was the British architecture critic who took Los Angeles seriously when nobody else would, and this is what happened when he pointed the same eye at the Mojave. He drives it, camps it, and picks at his own reaction the whole time — why does a man raised in green, wet Norwich find this country so beautiful and what does that say about him rather than about it. So you get Kelso, Death Valley, the Salton Sea, Amboy, the Marine base, roadside architecture, and a running argument with the desert writers who came before him. He’s funny, he’s a little embarrassed to be another Englishman in love with the Southwest, and he knows exactly what a Quonset hut is doing out there.
Scenes in America Deserta