Snippets from America - learning from Las Vegas

Learning from Las Vegas is the title of a book published in 1972 by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. The three were teachers and research students at the Yale School of Art And Architecture and their book proved to be highly influential in defining architectural Postmodernism. 

The position they took in analysing the Las Vegas is an interesting one. On the one hand, they appeared to be in agreement with everyone else that Las Vegas is the very epitome of artificiality, materialism and bad tasteand yet there was the accompanying view that, in the right hands,and with a generous measure of sophisticated irony the same superficiality and stylistic eclecticism might serve as the inspiration for a new architecture. 

In time, the book came to bear architectural fruit not so much in Las Vegas itself but in the business centres of New York and the City of London. Architects were encouraged to consider crass environments like the Las Vegas Strip, and to distill from them both elements and methodologies that they would go on to apply in entirely different contexts. For an extreme example of this kind of transplantation there is probably no better example than the MI6 headquarters building on the south bank of the Thames. 

During our own short trip to Las Vegas I was impressed by something quite different and that was the degree to which the various hotel-casinos along the strip - each of them representing some fabulous past culture or fantasy: Caesar’s Palace, the Luxor (ancient Egypt), the Venetian, Mandalay, Treasure Island - how, despite the crassness of these representation (where else could you see the Venice campanile, cheek by jowl with the Rialto Bridge?) how despite all of this, they genuinely succeed in creating an environment in which masses of people seem to enjoy something of the same ‘bread and circuses’ escapism enjoyed by the citizens of Ancient Rome. 

So, for me, I am inclined to take Las Vegas on it’s own terms - or preferably not at all. We were there for less than 24 hours and, though it was an unforgettable experience, it was more than enough.