Los Angelenos, take note: For four consecutive weekends next month, the tour company Esotouric will once again be offering its “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” series. Hosted by Richard Schave, a former student of Banham’s, the bus tours will explore the city’s built environment along four routes: South Los Angeles, Route 66, the New Chinatowns, and the Lowdown on Downtown. Banham, of course, was the influential British architecture critic who wrote 1971’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, among other books, and who famously said, “I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”

In 2007, Metropolis contributing editor Jade Chang took the Banham tour, snapping photos along the way. Click here to check out Chang’s virtual bus tour. And to see Banham himself exploring the city (with the aid of the fictional Baede-Kar visitor guidance system, pictured above), be sure to check out the 1972 BBC documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, which can be watched in its entirety on Google Video.