Archinect - News

The lessons we’re still ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ after 50 years

2023-01-27T16:32:00-05:00

What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, “Learning from Las Vegas” argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture.

Yale’s new visiting critic Christopher Hawthorne considers the lasting inspirational qualities and history of Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi's seminal 1972 text, whose origins can be traced to a studio the young newlyweds taught in New Haven in the fall of 1968. Hawthrone places it alongside Reynar Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies — published the year before — in an antiquated canon but says its impartial tone should be emulated by a new generation of high-minded designers hoping to dismantle or improve the pernicious social and environmental ramparts of our young century.

Related three-part feature series on Archinect: Learning from 'Learning from Las Vegas' with Denise Scott Brown, Part 1: The Foundation; Part 2: Pedagogy; Part 3: Research

“'To tear down Paris and begin again' is not so far, in spirit, from the current mood, even if the political goals of many young architects are quite different from those of the right-leaning Le Co...

Hawthorne and Wagner on Robert Venturi's theory impact

2018-10-01T14:01:00-04:00

The idea of the “both-and” suggested a new pluralism, and maybe a new tolerance, in architecture. But the phrase turned out to have its limits. To the extent that Venturi was making an argument in favor of a kind of big-tent populism in architecture, it was a space for new styles instead of new voices, new forms rather than new people. In fact, tucked inside Complexity and Contradiction is an argument for a renewed insularity in the profession [...].

Christoper Hawthorne, former LA Times architecture critic and now Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, dissects Robert Venturi's 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (which famously scoffs at the Miessian classical Modernism with the "less is a bore" tagline), and argues in his piece in The Atlantic that the array of new choices the book offered also limited architecture's broader access to the public and diversity in the profession.

Meanwhile in another publication of the Atlantic network, McMansion Hell blogger Kate Wagner is out with a CityLab article on how Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour's 1972 Learning from Las Vegas influenced an entire generation of architects, and her personally: "I came from Anywhere, U.S.A., far, far away from any great works of architecture," she writes. "Venturi’s elevation of everyday buildings made me feel seen, made me feel like the places I had observed, and my appreciation for them, were valid and me...

The Invention of Wessex: Thomas Hardy as Architect

2018-02-13T14:08:00-05:00

There is a good case for listing Thomas Hardy amongst the greatest of all conceptual architects — the prophet, well before the fact, of a particular type of speculative, imaginary architectural project which would boom a century later.

The 19th-century author Thomas Hardy has never been considered much of an architect. Yet as Kester Rattenbury shows, his creation of Wessex was an architectural project - one that drew on the ideas of his time, but also predicted some of the most inventive architectural work of our own age. Hardy saw rural England through an experimental, modern frame, and his Wessex Project was as radical in its time as Learning from Las Vegas and Delirious New York were in theirs.

Facsimile of the first hard cover edition of Learning from Las Vegas published by MIT press

2017-10-03T13:16:00-04:00

Now, decades after the original hardcover edition sold out, the MIT Press is publishing a facsimile edition of the original large-format Cooper-designed edition of Learning from Las Vegas, complete with translucent glassine wrap. This edition also features a spirited preface by Denise Scott Brown, looking back on the creation of the book and explaining her and Robert Venturi’s reservations about the original design.

45 years after its first publication, the groundbreaking book, Learning from Las Vegas, is still read, purchased and studied by architecture and urban planning students, thinkers and practitioners around the world.

Last year Archinect spoke with Denise Scott Brown about the Learning from Las Vegas on three themes: foundation, pedagogy, research.

MIT press is republishing a facsimile of the long discontinued, first hard cover edition of the book. The facsimile is sold for 100 dollars, much more than the paper back, but still much cheaper than the few remaining originals sold on the rare book market!

Learning from Las Vegas: a look at the Strip through urban planning lenses

2015-02-10T14:07:00-05:00

Al describes CityCenter as the product of “the Bilbao effect: the notion that buildings designed by celebrity architects bring in tourists, and in particular a higher-end type of visitor”. MGM’s version was to bring in name-brand architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Helmut Jahn and Norman Foster [...]. “It goes against the casino design convention,” Al says, “by having towers that let in natural light and meet the street the way buildings do in other cities” – with retail spaces, not gaming.

Revitalizing Las Vegas via the Downtown Project

2012-10-22T16:40:00-04:00

Richard Florida...thinks it needs a “robust community process,” in which an outside group could help build consensus with the surrounding community and create a plan that takes their wishes into account. “You can have serendipity,” he said. “But when you’re building a community, you also need a strategy.”

Timothy Pratt profiled Tony Hsieh and his Downtown Project for the Sunday NYT Magazine. The project began when the chief executive of Zappos decided to lease the former City Hall, instead of buying land and building the typical Silicon Valley corporate campus. In order to provide an attractive urban community for his employees, Hsieh went one step further and started the Downtown Project, a $350 million urban experiment to build "the most community-focused large city in the world". The goal is not R.O.I. but maximizing R.O.C (Return on community) and increasing "serendipitous encounters".