What Did They Actually Learn From Las Vegas?
What exactly did Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown learn from Las Vegas? Have they even been there? I have been to Las Vegas, multiple times. While the casino floors and the Black Jack tables of the Bellagio are a lot of fun, the city in itself is largely a desert anomaly composed of cheap-looking architecture that pulls from every corner of the world except the desserts of Mountain West America. The landscape of flashy signs, large parking lots, excessive pavement, and non-contextual architecture's only redeeming quality are its innumerable neon lights because they distract you from its larger flaws. It seems to me like the United States and real estate developers learned a lot from Las Vegas. They transformed the idea of 'suburban, rural America' from walk-able small towns to car-centric asphalt jungles. While post-modernism espoused ideals of non-conformity and rejected the grand narrative pattern of modernism, I find it paradoxical that the movement is responsible for the millions of identical strip malls that occupy every city in every state. So what did we learn from Las Vegas? Clearly it was how to overrun America with flashy signs, millions of cars, and large parking lots.
It seems so strange to me that Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi saw Las Vegas as being "American" architecture, when in reality it is the most artificial, non-American place in the US. Every building shouts out with fake Eiffel Towers and Egyptian pyramids that say "I'm not American." Even its origins are synthetic: Las Vegas only came into existence once the advent of the air-conditioner made desert living viable in the American West. I also disagree with the notion of "American architecture" in general. America is too large of a country (with too varied of environments, cultures, and landscapes) to be labeled and generalized by an artificial playground of capitalism out in the desert.
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