Learning from Las Vegas

Learning from Las Vegas is a 1972 book by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Translated into 18 languages, the book had a major impact on the emergence of postmodernism.[1]

Compilation

In March 1968, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wrote and published “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas” (Architectural Forum, March 1968). That following fall, the two created a research studio for graduate students at Yale School of Art and Architecture. The studio was called “Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research.” [2]

Izenour, a graduate student in the studio, accompanied his senior tutor colleagues, Venturi and Scott Brown, to Las Vegas in 1968 together with nine students of architecture, and four planning and graphics students to study the urban form of the city.

Las Vegas was regarded as a "non-city" and as an outgrowth of a "strip", along which were placed parking lots and singular frontages for gambling casinos, hotels, churches and bars. The research group studied various aspects of the city, including the commercial vernacular, lighting, patterns, styles and symbolism in the architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown created a taxonomy for the forms, signs, and symbols they encountered.[3] The two were inspired by the emphasis on sign and symbol they found on the Las Vegas strip. The result was a critique of Modern architecture, demonstrated most famously in the comparison between the "duck" and "decorated shed."

The "duck" represents a large part of modernist architecture, which was expressive in form and volume. In contrast, the "decorated shed" relies on imagery and sign. Virtually all architecture prior to the Modern Movement used decoration to convey meaning, often profound but sometimes simply perfunctory, such as the signage on medieval shop fronts. Only Modernist architecture eschewed such ornament, relying only on corporeal or structural elements to convey meaning. As such, argued the authors, Modern buildings became mute and vacuous, especially when built for corporate or government clients.[2]

Reception

Learning from Las Vegas caused a stir in the architectural world upon its publication, as it was hailed by progressive critics for its bold indictment of Modernism, and by the status quo as blasphemous. A split among young American architects occurred during the 1970s, with Izenour, Venturi, Robert A.M. Stern, Charles Moore and Allan Greenberg defending the book as "The Greys", and Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Michael Graves writing against its premises as "The Whites." It became associated with post-modernism when magazines such as Progressive Architecture published articles citing its influence on the younger generation. When Tom Wolfe wrote his often-pilloried book, From Bauhaus to Our House, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour were among the heroes the author praised for their stand against heroic Modernism.

References

  1. ↑ Tracking Sustainability in Architecture
  2. 1 2 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1972, revised 1977. ISBN 0-262-72006-X
  3. ↑ Brownlee, D. B. (2001). Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates Architecture, Urbanism, Design. Philadelphia: Museum of Art. pp. 37–38. ISBN 978-0876331484.

Further reading

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