Learning from Las Vegas
Saturday, February 26, 2011 at 9:29PM 
As I strolled up and down the Las Vegas Strip the last couple days I can’t help but to think back to my years in architecture school. I think about how almost every lesson taught to me about sustainability and responsible building has been broken. The utter thought alone of a city in the middle of the desert is enough to prove this fact without even coming here. This doesn’t seem to bother me that much at the moment tough. The thoughts that seem to be occupying my mind mostly circle around the book Learning from Las Vegas - Connecting With Symbolism in Architecture. So for this entry I think it would be appropriate to talk about that.
Learning from Las Vegas was called by Denise Scott Brown “treatise on symbolism in architecture” and to me that is the most interesting part. Venturi and Brown talked about Las Vegas, especially the strip, as a departure from traditional architecture that focused on space and forms within buildings. To them and their students they saw the strip as a more outward communication, a communication that spoke to the strip and the world outside through symbolism. When this book was written in the late 70’s they felt this was lacking in architecture. Venturi and Brown saw Vegas as a victory over this 70’s architecture and the ideal place to study symbolism-in-space (Vegas) over forms-in-space (70s modern architecture).
Brown and Venturi argued through this text that space and its relationships are created through symbols and not forms. The lasting thing that I took from this text is the idea symbolism and its importance in the social fabric and how it communicates over space rather then being treated as a form in space.
This is a curious question, what defines a space? Is it its adornments or its forms? Seeing any of Venturi and Brown’s buildings and seeing the modern architecture they were addressing , even without reading this text, you know where they stand. As a burgeoning designer though I still wonder where I stand. Aesthetically I like the simplicity and functionality of design from say the 20’s to today and I can’t picture myself designing a building with the over adornment of the post-modern architecture spurred on by architects like Venturi. Sitting here today in Vegas though I wonder the value of its symbols over its form. Its billboards and non-structural ionic columns pasted over its façade as if it was some sort of modern electrically powered Rome, a reality that is weird to me. Then I turn around to see a group of Japanese tourists taking pictures of it like it is Rome and seeing their excitement. The symbols are creating this energy – not the building’s (structural) form. It is so strongly ingrained in us that Roman architecture and art is beauty and it is but should that mean re-creating it should make that casino/hotel just as beautiful even at the determent of the buildings efficiency, functionally and environmentally?
Even more I still wonder about the new dawn of architecture and this text’s importance in the architectural discourse going forward. Myself as a designer, and many of my fellow designers/architects, struggle with the new digital frontier. Now instead of the glowing neon and blinking lights there is this idea of digital decoration and digital reproduction. The flexibility the digital age provides may allow for the middle ground most people have been looking for. It allows for the functionality in architecture while also allow buildings to respond to the greater worlds opinions on design treading that line between forms-in-space and symbolism-in-space. I look forward to engaging in this dialogue within architecture and art throughout my career as only in practice can a direction be found.
Reader Comments (1)
I guess even architecture should be treated as a living entity what with the changes every decade or so. It's something that changes with the time, which can be bad or good.