Learning from Las Vegas
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour · 1972
OVERVIEW
A study of the Las Vegas Strip published in 1972 by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, based on a Yale studio conducted in 1968. The team surveyed the Strip with the tools of architectural history: plans, elevations, maps of signage and light, a film.
The argument is that the buildings are subordinate to the signs, and that this is not a failure. It proposes two types: the duck, a building shaped like what it sells, and the decorated shed, an ordinary box with a sign on it.
WHY IT MATTERS
A way to sharpen the archive beyond taste: learning to read environments as systems of signs.
CONTEXT
It arrived as an attack on the orthodoxy of late modernism, which held that form should express structure and programme. The book instead asked architects to look at what ordinary commercial building actually does and to read it rather than correct it.
The 1977 revised edition removed much of the polemic and most of the images, which is worth knowing when choosing an edition. Scott Brown's authorship was for decades credited unevenly against Venturi's, a fact the profession only addressed late.
WHAT TO NOTICE
- 01The duck and the decorated shedTwo categories that still sort almost any commercial building. Once you have them you cannot stop applying them.
- 02It is a survey, not an essayThe method is mapping and measurement. The authority comes from having counted things.
- 03Sign over structureThe claim is that the sign is the architecture and the building is the support. Test it against any retail park.
- 04Which edition you haveThe 1972 first edition is a designed object with a large plate section. The 1977 revision is a different, plainer book.
CONNECTIONS
- THE SIGN DETACHESSimulacra and Simulation / Jean Baudrillard
Published nine years apart and arriving at the same place from opposite directions. Venturi and Scott Brown surveyed the Strip and concluded the sign had replaced the building; Baudrillard concluded the sign had replaced the world.
EXPLORE FURTHER
- BOOK / MIT PressLearning from Las Vegas
The publisher's page for the revised edition. MIT Press refuses automated requests, so open it in a browser.