"To move the earth Archimedes required a lever long enough and somewhere to rest it—a gizmo and an infrastructure—but the great American gizmo can get by without any infrastructure." Reyner Banham, the British architectural critic who first visited the United States at age 39 (and taught himself to drive in order to "read Los Angeles in the original") belongs to the great tradition of writers, like Alexis de Tocqueville a century prior, who understood American culture better than most people who have spent their lives here.