Back in the Denise Scott Brown temporary exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao, and this was another part of Learning from Las Vegas that immediately made some sort of sense to me, which is always something of a relief. Being honest, a lot of temporary exhibitions are far too niche for me, so this arrangement felt much more agreeable.
The idea is that Las Vegas developed a very particular architectural language because people were moving past buildings quickly, usually in cars, and needed to understand them at speed. And Las Vegas is hardly understated, not point in whispering what you’re about when a fifty foot sign will do.
The second part of the image is even better, showing a building that is itself the sign. This is where architecture gives up on subtlety entirely and decides that if the business is a duck, the building might as well be a duck. I like this clarity. And so Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour realised that there was a great logic to the Strip, the road was wide, the cars moved quickly and the signs did the work. Space, scale, speed and symbol all mattered, because this was a landscape designed to be read in motion. So there was a system in the chaos which is all rather pleasing as Las Vegas isn’t really a place that often asks if it might be overdoing things.