Peter Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was an English critic and historian whose articles, books, and lectures helped define the understanding of modern architecture and technology. A student of such early twentieth-century intellectual masters as Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion, he would go on to intersect with some of the revolutionary cultural movements of his era, from Brutalist architecture to Pop Art.

In the 1960s he lived primarily in the United States, and authored one of the classic books on Los Angeles landscape and urbanism, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. He authored numerous other important books, including Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, Scenes in America Deserta, and A Concrete Atlantis- US Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture.

He died in London shortly after being appointed Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.