Learning From Las Vegas

First published in 1972 and since translated into 18 languages, Learning from Las Vegas was a celebration of the so-called ugly and day-to-day landscape of Las Vegas, the gambling city in the American southwest. Co-written by the late Robert Venturi and his partner-wife Denise Scott Brown and collaborator Steven Izenour, the book is one of the most influential urban studies of the 20th, or perhaps, any century.

Building on a budding interest in the quotidian car-centric scenography of the American hinterland, Venturi and Scott Brown led a Yale University architecture studio study of Las Vegas in the late 1960s. They put together a serious, exhaustive analysis of the architectural form and character of a rather tatty, seemingly unserious place. Areas of study ranged from signage to the oasis interiors of casino megastructures, to the white supremacist undertones of its aesthetic symbolism. They photographed buildings and spaces, extensively recording their observations with wit and reverence. They contextualised Las Vegas, placing it in an architectural pantheon that spanned ancient Rome to the Renaissance, and in so doing, made us take mass culture more seriously. The book reminds us that throughout most of architectural history, until Modernism, iconography, symbolism and ornament were central to the expression of buildings. Las Vegas, the authors assert, may seem so modern but it is merely doing what has been done for centuries. It makes more sense in the arc of Western architectural history than, say, a Miesian tower block.

Beyond its artfully scripted prose, this is a highly visual book. Its photography of the streetscapes, the ordinary scenes and the extraordinary (such as neon signs), are enigmatic. Photography, much of it taken by Scott Brown herself, is used as a visual analysis tool. There are striking grids of photographs illustrating apple-to-apple comparisons of different typologies, such as casinos: their panoramas, fronts, sides, parts, entrances and parking arrangements; or petrol stations and the variance in their brand expression. The graphics too are radical and instructive. They tell many stories: from the distribution of rent-a-car spaces to the footprint of hotels to illumination levels at night. Intricate monochromatic analytical maps are drawn with a care that likely would have impressed Nolli himself. They are works of art in their own right, and in choosing to portray such a lowbrow place with such care, they elevate the very place itself.

One highlight is a brilliant illustration of every written word seen from the road along the Las Vegas Strip. With hints of Guy Debord, words from neon signs are placed two dimensionally, to scale and at their exact orientation, on a plan of the Strip. Forty-seven years after it was first published, it still feels fresh and contemporary as a piece of communication design. This exceptionally conceived cartography demonstrates just how valuable sophisticated graphic design is to the work of urban practitioners. (Any report of urban analysis can flop spectacularly if it does a poor job at visualising the urban). No surprise that graphic design students accompanied Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour on their Yale studio. The lesson is that even in the cold analysis of hard urban data, there is room for graphics to be a bit tongue-incheek, to have a personality. I suspect they were taking a cue from Las Vegas’ own sense of fun.

There is much more to learn from Learning from Las Vegas. It gives us a methodology of how to study, analyse and diagnose a city in the round. In fusing together elements of architectural investigation with a bit of amateur anthropology and some high art scholarship, the book sets out an approach for how to uncover the DNA of a place. Everywhere has a vernacular that can be explored in this way.

On re-reading it, I asked myself if Bob and Denise - my first employers after I finished university - were in their prime today, what would they study? I think they would have loved to scrutinise a Tokyo or a Hong Kong, or perhaps somewhere within that arc of urban growth between -ai cities - Shanghai to Mumbai to Dubai - where much of the world’s urbanisation is happening. Today, they would have certainly had to grapple with the issues of mobile technology and social media, and how they are shaping and altering our experience of the city. Just imagine the photography element: Instagram that.

And how would a study of Las Vegas in 2019 be different? For one, Sin City now is bigger and flashier with a population more than double what it was in 1972. It’s also much more diverse. A significant largely Latino immigrant population lives there, many of them employed in low-income jobs in the hospitality industry. There is a restive labour movement in the city struggling for better working conditions. It is a reminder that social injustice makes Vegas possible. And, we should acknowledge, so does ecological terror. The recklessness of having a large sprawling, car-centric, energy intensive mega-suburb in an inhospitable climate, is arguably criminal.

Ultimately though Learning from Las Vegas does offer a timeless lesson. It teaches those who are custodians and shapers of the city to be a bit humbler. 'Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect,’ the book opens, ‘not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way’. As a series of tactics, the study was not just innovative, it was an emphatically inclusive undertaking. We could all use a bit more of that spirit these days.