Steven Song is a young architect currently practicing in New York City. He has worked for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Arquitectonica, Urban Design Associates, and Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. In addition to the involvement with these offices, Steven is practicing his ideas through VIUM, a design group which he founded with young colleagues. In 2007-8, he co-authored "Shifting Paradigms: Renovating the Decorated Shed," in collaboration with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Steven is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University.

Written and edited by Steven Song, Jimmy Stamp, and Sun-Young Park

Jimmy Stamp is a freelance writer and editor of the blog "Life without Buildings." He is currently enrolled in the MED program at the Yale School of Architecture, where he is researching the relationships between media, popular culture, and the built environment.

Sun-Young Park is a PhD student in architectural and urban history at Harvard University. Her research interests center around the history of the body and its relation to the built environment, focusing on developments in public health and hygiene in 19th century France. Sun-Young received her architectural training at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and completed her BA at Princeton University.

In 1972, we learned from Las Vegas the power of signage, through Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's use of the ‘duck’ and ‘decorated shed’ as metaphors for expressive and symbolic architectureii. In their seminal book Learning from Las Vegas , Venturi and Scott Brown acknowledged the duality of architecture -- its role as both ‘shelter’ in its interiority and ‘signage’ in its communicative, decorative, informative, and symbolic aspects.


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Figure 1 - Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown during their 1968 studio trip in Las Vegas
© VSBA Archives

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Figure 2 - A Roman soldier statue and a casino parking lot in Las Vegas
© VSBA Archives

From October 29, 2009 to Feb 5, 2010, Yale School of Architecture Gallery held What We Learned , an exhibition that features the teaching, research, and design work of Venturi and Scott Brown. The exhibition was made up of two independently organized shows.

One, "The Yale Las Vegas Studio," a traveling exhibition first presented by the Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, Switzerland, in 2008 by Martino Stierli and Hilar Stadler, featured original photographs, slides, and documents from the pair's archive of the 1968 studio at Yale which resulted in their Las Vegas book. The other, "The Work of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates," designed by Dean Sakamoto and David Sadighian, was a concept-based, three-dimensional display of selected work of the Philadelphia firm, organized around five themes: Context, Mannerism, Communication, Automobile City, and Urban Research, reappraising the firm's key ideas manifested from the mid-1960s through today. (Figure 3)



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Figure 3 - Installation and title panel views of The Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates Exhibit, What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates
© Yale Media Services

For four days in January, an international group of architects, artists, writers, scholars and students convened at the University’s Paul Rudolph Hall to re-evaluate Venturi and Scott Brown's theories and investigate their cross-disciplinary significance and potential from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Presided by Dean Robert A.M. Stern and organized by Stanislaus von Moos, the current Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at the Yale School of Architecture, the "Architecture after Las Vegas" symposium revolved around themes and provocations inherent in Learning from Las Vegas , a text that continues to inspire and provoke artists, planners, designers, and architects more than forty years after its first publication. (Figure 4 & 5)


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Figure 4 - "Architecture after Las Vegas" symposium at Paul Rudolph Hall, Yale University
© Yale School of Architecture, photo by K.Brandt Knapp

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Figure 5 - Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown with undergraduate students
© Heather J. Clark
[Click this link to view the programs and the list of speakers at the symposium, from Yale School of Architecture website.iii]

This article recapitulates some of the discussions that happened during and after the symposium, focusing particularly on topics and themes that call for further inquiry.


Venturi and Scott Brown’s Influences beyond Architecture

Venturi and Scott Brown have often commented on the wide-ranging impact of Learning from Las Vegas . Its ideas have transcended architectural discourse to influence academics and professionals in many fields. In particular, there is a rich tradition of mutual influence and inspiration between the work of the pair and the visual arts, as illustrated by several speakers during the “Architecture after Vegas” symposium.

Robert Venturi traces the celebration of the 'ugly and ordinary' so often mentioned in their writing back to the Realist paintings of the 19th century, but these ideas are perhaps most apparent in the Pop Art of the following century. Pieces such as Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans transform ordinary commercial objects into something “made special via modifications of medium, scale, and context.”iv It is from Pop Art that Venturi and Scott Brown derive their method for objectively documenting the commercial landscape. As multiple speakers noted during the symposium, they believe that new insight can be gained by looking non-judgmentally at the environment. This 'deadpan' analytic method was borrowed from the work of Ed Ruscha. (Figure 6) In publications like Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Every Building on the Sunset Strip , Ruscha used this technique “to overcome artistic considerations such as selection, composition, and proportion, as well as the selective perception of the human eye,” as Martino Stierli noted in his symposium speech “Las Vegas and the Mobilized Gaze.” The idea of altered perception through objective deadpanning can arguably be traced back to silent film star Buster Keaton, who maintains a calm demeanor and expressionless face throughout incredibly outrageous situations. (Figure 7) Keaton’s cinematic doppelganger seems to exist independently of the world around him, with a completely objective outlook that permits him to conceive of uses for objects and spaces far beyond their accepted function. In Keaton’s hands, a clothing line becomes a pole for vaulting, a truck becomes an ersatz bridge. In Venturi and Scott Brown’s, a neon sign becomes architecture.


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Figure 6 - In 1965, Ed Ruscha photographed every building on the Sunset strip
© Ed Ruscha

Figure 7 - Buster Keaton
© Unknown

The relationship between text/sign and landscape documented in Learning from Las Vegas has continued to evolve in the art of Ruscha - whose more recent work isolates text completely, floating it across the picture plane in front of landscape images or abstract sunsets. It can also be seen in the work of other contemporary artists, Wayne White for example, who paints advertising slogans and colloquial expressions into 'readymade' commercial landscape paintings found in thrift stores; as well as into modern car commercials and television shows. A feedback loop of commercial culture that began with the automotive landscape continues to perpetuate itself.

The popular landscape - which is to say the 'common' or 'ordinary' landscape - and ideas of mass communication take on a different meaning in Alterations to a Suburban House , the piece presented during Dan Graham’s symposium statement, Alterations is an architectural model of a suburban home whose front facade has been replaced with an expanse of transparent glass and whose interior is divided by a continuous mirror stretching the length of the house, separating the now visible public functions of the house (kitchen, living room, dining room) from the hidden private functions (bedrooms and bathrooms). The mirror reflects the lives of those within, but also the facades of the homes across the street. The glass facade becomes a billboard that communicates both the physical structure and the social structure of the American suburb, while simultaneously subverting both. The relationship between private and public blurs as passersby are reflected in the interior of the house, existing within the same plane as those who actually reside within the home. (Figure 8)


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Figure 8 - Dan Graham's Alterations to a Suburban House
© Walker Art Center

While it is true that Venturi and Scott Brown learned from Pop Art, Scott Brown is quick to distinguish Pop Art from the 'pop' commercial landscape of the strip or the ordinary landscape of the suburb. As she noted in the 1971 article “Learning from Pop,” “TV commercials and mass mag ads, billboards and Route 66 are sources for a changing architectural sensibility... The forms of the pop landscape are as relevant to us now as were the forms of antique Rome to the Beaux Arts, Cubism and machine architecture to the early moderns...” Free from the strict tenets of previous Modernisms, the popular landscape evolved over time to reflect cultural conditions “not only aesthetically, but on many levels of necessity.”v


Setting the Record Straight with the Opposition

Although not present at the symposium, Karsten Harries, an admired professor at Yale, has played an active role in challenging the duo. In his article "Thoughts on a Non-Arbitrary Architecture," Harries quotes from Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture -- "Architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness and delight….An architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: Its truth must be in its totality or its implication of totality, it must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion." This call by Venturi for inclusion is, he claims, no different from Walter Gropius' dream of the “complete building,” a dream that "amounts to a subjection of the demands of life to the demands of aesthetics."vi This is a grave misunderstanding, a reductive reading that the term 'difficult unity' should have precluded.vii Far from subjecting life to aesthetics, Venturi and Scott Brown call in Learning from Las Vegas for embracing life’s punches in the attempt to set a new equilibrium between firmness, commodity and delight. They see variety in society and in the cityscape as creating tension that promotes many levels of interpretation and resolves, if at all, in a sophisticated unity. Venturi has also suggested that architecture should look to and learn from Pop Art's contradictions of scale and context instead of relying on facile (Gestalt) unities.viii (Figure 9 & 10)


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Figure 9 – Walter Gropius’s Fagus Shoe Works, Alfel-an-der-Leine, Germany
© Hans Hildebrandt

Figure 10 – Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates’ Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London, England
© VSBA Archives (Inset: Timothy Soar)

Despite this, we wonder if on some levels, Harries' ideas are closer to those of Venturi and Scott Brown than he realizes. Harries has disagreed with Nikolaus Pevsner's contention that, "A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of Architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building, the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal," arguing that "the simplistic underlying rationale (in Pevsner’s contention) was limited to the way a building looked."ix We think that Venturi and Scott Brown would also disagree with Pevsner on this – and for a similar reason that architecture involves a lot more than an aesthetic appeal.

Paul Goldberger, in his recent book Why Architecture Matters , discusses how architecture is a delicate balance between art and practicality, and how the two cannot be perceived separately. This aligns with what Harries calls "the ethical function that brings challenge and comfort together: the building whose high aesthetic ambition exists also to fulfill a social purpose."x Goldberger then states that while it seems impossible that there can be comfort in architecture if its mission is to challenge and upset the order of the universe as we know it, this is the magic of architecture's synthesis: when it works right, it startles us and comforts us at the same time, fulfilling Harries' ethical function. Goldberger states that he finds this synthesis in Italian Mannerists like Michelangelo and Romano; Sir John Soane; the "laser-like intensity of Le Corbusier"; Mies van der Rohe; Kahn; the "seemingly disordered forms of Gehry"; and last but not least, the contemporary mannerism of Venturi and Scott Brown. xi


PoMo vs. Postmodernism, or a Different Reading of Venturi and Scott Brown’s Position

Conflicts of ideas should not be diluted or ignored, but studied critically. Since Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas , Venturi and Scott Brown have explored and emphasized the importance of learning from the vernacular landscape to better understand the social, cultural, and technological context of the present. However, their celebratory 'learning-from' the vernacular, especially 1960s pop culture, has acquired the reductive label of ‘postmodernism.’

As a response to this, in the keynote speech of the “Architecture after Vegas” symposium, Venturi and Scott Brown clarified the postmodernism that they actually agree with, versus its highly commercialized and superficial version -- 'PoMo' -- from which they disassociate themselves. (Figure 11) Scott Brown said, “PoMo architects misunderstood the social planners and disregarded social concerns. In our opinion, they also lacked design knowledge and were not good with scale. They took a narrow view of context. PoMo architects handled history by imitation and with insufficient knowledge; also self-indulgently, humorlessly and with little attention to relevance… we are postmodernists, but only in the early 1960s sense that derived from the arts, humanities, social upheaval and the social sciences.” In an interview with Vladimir Paperny in 2005, Venturi and Scott Brown also stated, "There was a postmodernism... which talked about the end of innocence with the Holocaust, about multiculturalism, about reserving judgment, about being skeptical even about your own best ideas – that we very much agree with.”xii


Figure 11 - Philip Johnson wearing a replica of his PPG Building - a PoMo building
© Joseph Astor

Through a series of e-mail exchanges following the symposium, we discussed with von Moos the Frankfurt School’s critique of postmodernism as a form of counter-Enlightenment, as an anti-modern tenet that dismantles everything that European philosophy and science have held to be fundamentally true. This is an important and valid criticism of postmodernism. However, we wonder if Venturi and Scott Brown's arguments might, in many respects, align better with the (second generation) Frankfurt School's critical theory than with postmodernism.xiii We feel a connection can be drawn between the possibilities Venturi and Scott Brown saw in Early Modern architecture and in Mannerism, and the potential that the school’s thinkers like Jürgen Habermas found in 'incomplete' Modernity and Enlightenment. Venturi and Scott Brown have repeatedly stated their admiration for Early Modernism. In a conversation with von Moos for his 1999 book on the couple’s works, Scott Brown said, “We have always claimed that we are Modernists, in any rational definition of Modernism, because it is our point of departure. We subscribe to a set of ways of building that stem from the Modern movement, and we think of ourselves as functionalists. We have approached Modernism as loyal supporters who change it to keep it relevant.”xiv In the first chapter of the pair’s recent book, Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time , Venturi thoroughly explained the lessons that he learned from early Mannerists, and adapted and used in his design.xv In the introduction to Habermas’ influential essay “Modernity – An Incomplete Project,” Thomas Docherty wrote, “Habermas sees the possibility of salvaging Enlightenment rationality… Habermas accepts that errors have been made in the attempt to attain such a rational society; but this should not negate the project of modernity as such.”xvi Venturi, Scott Brown and Habermas all challenged the existing paradigms and acknowledged their problems, but endeavored to build upon and evolve them, rather than suggesting something entirely revolutionary and new. Along similar lines, in his essay "The Doubles of Postmodernism," Robert A.M. Stern also distinguishes Venturi and Scott Brown from other 'schismatic' postmodernists, by considering the pair as the 'traditional' ones, who argue for “recognition of the continuity of the cultural tradition of Western Humanism of which it holds modernism to be a part."xvii

Scott Brown seemed to support this view in this statement from her speech, “And we are also Modernists, in the early 1930s sense, engaged in the traditional Modernist project of updating Modern tenets to allow of change.” In the preface to the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas , Venturi and Scott Brown also stated, “Because we have criticized Modern architecture, it is proper here to state our intense admiration of its early period when its founders, sensitive to their own times, proclaimed the right revolution. Our argument lies mainly with the irrelevant and distorted prolongation of that old revolution today.”xviii


Where Do We Go from Here? What Should the Younger Generation of Architects Learn from All This?

The lessons from Venturi and Scott Brown’s works are clearly being attended to in various ways. At the symposium, Beatriz Colomina showed other 'learning-from' series, including "Learning from Levittown," "Learning from Hamburger," "Learning from Pop," "Learning from Aalto," and lastly, "Learning from Everything." These were mostly written by the pair but there are other authors and architects who are taking “learning-from” forward in their own ways. Vincent Lacovara and Geoff Shearcroft of AOC taught a design studio called "Learning from Milton Keynes" at London Metropolitan University last year. Mathieu Borysevicz recently published a book called Learning from Hangzhou . Stan Allen introduced two Princeton University courses that both implicitly and explicitly stem from Venturi and Scott Brown's thesis - SANAA's "Learning from Japan," and Alejandro Zaera-Polo's "Politics of the Building Envelope". Karin Theunissen is teaching a studio at Delft University of Technology that investigates and “learns from” the pair’s works, especially the relationship between their spatial layouts -- interior streets, multi-layering of spaces, etc. -- and their facade configurations. Valéry Didelon showed contemporary buildings in Europe that were influenced by “Venturism,” including Kunsthal in Rotterdam by OMA, and the Villa in the town of Hoogvilet by FAT, a community building and a more obvious and expressive adaptation of Venturi and Scott Brown's facade design. Aron Vinegar and Katherine Smith collaborated on Relearning from Las Vegas , a collection of essays on architecture, culture, and philosophy that provides a contemporary insight into the continuing influence of Learning from Las Vegas . Stanislaus von Moos in his opening lecture, “The City as Spectacle: A View from the Gondola” viewed Venice through the lens that Venturi and Scott Brown first crafted when they were studying Las Vegas. These, and other influences on the arts discussed earlier, are part of the Venturi-Scott Brown ripple. (Figure 12)


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Figure 12 - Some of the speakers at the symposium. Clockwise from top left: Robert Venturi; Denise Scott Brown; Stanislaus von Moos; Karin Theunissen; Dan Graham; and Beatriz Colomina
© Yale School of Architecture, photo by K.Brandt Knapp

Peter Eisenman started his speech by quoting Rem Koolhaas' statement on Venturi and Scott Brown's study of Las Vegas. Koolhaas said that Learning from Las Vegas initiated the second wave of studies on capitalism and architecture, following Mies van der Rohe.xix Eisenman added, "Their (Venturi and Scott Brown's) books go beyond that - they remain as a historic short-cut between mannerism and the contemporary city." According to Eisenman, any (effective) communication must have both grammar and rhetoric, and in Venturi and Scott Brown’s oeuvre, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture established the former and Learning from Las Vegas provided the latter. Their latest collaborative book, Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time , could be understood as a communication to the younger generation of architects that utilizes both the grammar and the rhetoric that they have developed. Eisenman stated that Venturi and Scott Brown initiated a radical change in architectural discourse, opening a whole new world of thinking, and ended his speech with a “big thank-you.” (Figure 13)


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Figure 13 - From left to right: Rafael Moneo; Stan Allen; Peter Eisenman; Dean Robert A.M. Stern; and Denise Scott Brown
© Yale School of Architecture, photo by K.Brandt Knapp

We think there are at least four major lessons in Learning from Las Vegas that are relevant, especially today. The first is the understanding of the emerging automobile cities of the American Southwest and now of many other places in the world.xx The second is the most obvious and the most discussed - the reassessment of the role of iconography, symbolism and communication in architecture in our current Information Age. The third lesson is a social one, or as Scott Brown said in her introduction to the second edition of the book, “to learn a new receptivity to the tastes and values of other people and a new modesty in our designs and in our perception of our role as architects in society.”xxi The fourth lesson often overlooked but perhaps just as important as the first three, is the methodology that Venturi and Scott Brown employ to study Las Vegas. Las Vegas was selected as a study subject over Los Angeles because it is a purer form of the (automobile, commercialism) phenomenon. Venturi and Scott Brown separate out variables of the study to understand the whole, and then - very important – bring them together again in design. This approach is useful and necessary for designers to understand the complexities of the modern world.

In her lecture, Mary McLeod questioned whether the ‘ducks’ are really dead. Today, architecture is often merely a tool for marketing and a commercialized spectacle. Given – until recently -- surpluses of building opportunities, fueled by oil-money and willing investors, and supported by a host of new technologies, architecture became a quick way of making money. The means became the end. However, instead of using the opportunities and the technologies simply as tools, we doers and makers should broaden our intellectual inquiry, should question what changes these factors bring to our lives and how we can address them via design.

"Shifting Paradigms: Renovating the Decorated Shed ,” is an effort in this vein. It places the Venturi-Scott Brown methodology within technological developments in contemporary architecture and explores shifting social paradigms in modern times. Learning from recent developments in communication technology and considering global demographic movements, the article suggests that today’s changes necessitate a redefinition of context, signage, and shelter and a reconsideration of their relationships to one another.xxii

"A Few More Words," the student seminar on Sunday, provided a stirring epilogue to the symposium. Moderated by Jimmy Stamp, an MED student at Yale, it offered a forum for the school’s graduate and doctoral students to discuss questions that are important to them with Venturi and Scott Brown. Among the topics were sustainability, changing notions of private and public space, the use of new computer technologies, and the expansion of the architectural discourse to the Internet. In Having Words , the book that first inspired the seminar, Scott Brown calls herself 'architecture’s grandmother.' Here she proved she was every bit our clan’s matriarch and at times our Dutch Uncle. Where is your rigor? She asked the doctoral students. She meant academic rigor, which she thought was lacking in doctoral level research these days. This was Scott Brown holding true to her self-imposed mandate to “help architecture be set for the future.” (Figure 14)


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Figure 14 - "A Few More Words" student seminar with graduate and doctoral students
© Yale School of Architecture, photo by K.Brandt Knapp

Dean Stern, in his closing remarks, reminded us how difficult it was for books like Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas to be published - they broke too many taboos. Venturi and Scott Brown's colleagues at Yale did not consider the Las Vegas studio a valid architectural study, and even students had difficulty accepting Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture at first, because it went against everything they were being taught at the time. But the ideas are well received today. Indeed, Mark Wigley has said that Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas are on his list of the four most important books ever written on Western architecture.xxiii And the symposium speaker's lectures proved his point by carrying forward the ideas in creative and relevant ways. The symposium has helped us to put aside the debris of misunderstanding that accompanied earlier receptions of Venturi and Scott Brown's ideas, and to set them back on the track originally intended. Stern mentioned another kind of rigor that Venturi and Scott Brown have lived by and that we should learn from. Throughout their careers, for themselves and for others, they have set the bar very high.


- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -

Special thanks to Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Stanislaus von Moos, Katherine Smith, Martino Stierli, Valéry Didelon, Naomi and Dean Sakamoto, John Jacobson, Richard DeFlumeri, Heather J. Clark, James Venturi, Nora McDevitt, Yoonwhe Leo Moon, Heekyung and Pil-bae Song, and Jiwon Choi for their advice, criticism and invaluable help in the writing of this article.


[i ] Stanislaus von Moos first mentioned this title in his closing remarks of the symposium, referring to it as a possible alternative to the one that was finally chosen ("Architecture after Las Vegas"). When we were floating around potential titles for our article, we thought this would be a fitting one for what we were up to.
[ii] And also Steven Izenour, the third co-author of Learning from Las Vegas and principal in the firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. His important contributions to the book and to architecture have been mentioned by several speakers at the symposium. Because this article also discusses Venturi and Scott Brown's works and writings before and after Izenour's involvement as their collaborator, we decided to mention him in this endnote instead.
[iii] From http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/events/lectures_symposia/architecture_after_LV_spring_10
[iv] Venturi, Robert, and Denise Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time . (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 39
[v] Scott Brown, Denise, “Learning From Pop,” Casabella no359, 1971, pp 1-4
[vi] Harries, Karsten, "Thoughts on a Non-Arbitrary Architecture," Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology , (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 43-44
[vii] After we wrote this, von Moos reminded us that in philosophy and in thinking, so-called 'misunderstandings' can lead to the beginning of new wisdoms. We agree with him that perhaps a separate discussion that would take Harries’ point of view as a philosopher into account is necessary.
[viii] Venturi, Robert, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture , (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 104.
[ix] Goldberger, Paul, "Meaning, Culture, and Symbol," Why Architecture Matters , (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 37.
[x] Goldberger, Paul, "Challenge and Comfort," Why Architecture Matters , (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 61.
[xi] Goldberger, Paul, "Challenge and Comfort," p. 63.
[xii] Paperny, Vladimir, “Interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi,” http://www.paperny.com/venturi.html (2005).
[xiii] It is important to differentiate here the second generation Frankfurt School to which we refer from its original thinkers, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment , was highly critical of the Enlightenment, claiming that its dependence on rationality, etc., led to the totalitarianism of the 20th Century. Horkheimer and Adorno, in fact, found Habermas to be “not Critical enough.”
[xiv] Von Moos, Stanislaus, Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates (New York, NY: The Monacelli Press, Inc., 1999), Cover.
[xv] Venturi, Robert, and Denise Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time . (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 74-101.
[xvi] Habermas, Jurgen, “Modernity – an Incomplete Project,” repr. in Thomas Docherty (ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader (New York, NY; Columbia University Press, 1993). p. 95.
[xvii] Stern, Robert A.M. "The Doubles of Postmodernism," in Andreas Papadakis and Harriet Watson
(Eds.), New Classicism (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), pp. 167-175.
[xviii] Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972; revised edition 1977), p. xiii.
[xix] Becker, Lynn, "Oedipus Rem - Interview with Rem Koolhaas," http://www.lynnbecker.com/repeat/OedipusRem/koolhaasint.htm . In this interview, Koolhaas stated, "I think what Mies tried to do is find a way to make the sublime compatible with capitalism...I think that the first real engagement with the aesthetics of capitalism is a kind of transcending it.”
[xx] Theunissen, Karin, “Re-building as Urban Tactic, Examining Venturi Scott Brown and Associates' transformation from within the American campus," The Architecture Annual 2004-2005 , (Delft University of Technology, 2006). The purpose of Venturi and Scott Brown’s studio project, from which Learning from Las Vegas derived, has been recently outlined by Theunissen: “This studio was entitled `Learning from Las Vegas, or Form analysis as design research' and was introduced as `a study that will help to define a new type of urban form emerging in America..., that from ignorance, we define today as urban sprawl.' The object of the study is given as `to understand this new form, and to begin to evolve techniques for its handling...' From this we understand that Learning from Las Vegas is a study in observation of the form of the city, followed by the recording, analysis and processing of the data `to be made useful as design tools for urban designers.' The original publication contains marginal notes in bold text referring to aspects of the technical analysis, such as `This has been a technical studio. We are evolving new tools: analytical tools for understanding, new space and form, and graphic tools for representing them.”
[xxi] Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972; revised edition 1977), p. xvii.
[xxii] Song, Steven, and Sun-Young Park, “Shifting Paradigms | Renovating the Decorated Shed,” http://www.archinect.com/features/article.php?id=75248_0_23_24_M . In 2007-8 Steven Song and Sun-Young Park wrote the article in collaboration with Venturi and Scott Brown.
[xxiii] Dean Mark Wigley of Columbia University said this in his introduction of Venturi and Scott Brown’s lecture in 2007. The other two were Palladio’s The Four Books on Architecture and Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture .