This is from the Denise Scott Brown temporary exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao, and shows material connected with ‘Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research, the 1968 Yale School of Art and Architecture’ project that later helped lead to the famous 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. I had thought that this exhibition all seemed a bit niche and hard work until I started to meander around it, especially as I’m fascinated with urban planning (ah, Sim City!) and the development of Las Vegas.
Rather than treating Las Vegas as an embarrassment to be ignored by serious architects, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour asked what could actually be learned from it. They studied signs, buildings, roads, parking lots and commercial symbols, looking at the city as it really existed rather than as architects might have preferred it to behave. And the evolution of Las Vegas is, if I’m being honest, a bit ridiculous and from a city planning perspective, rather sub-optimal. But, they wanted to create sense from the chaos, recording the signs that people saw as they walked down the strip, getting meaning from the clutter.
What I liked about this arrangement was that it turned something as supposedly ordinary as a commercial road into a proper object of study. The wider argument of Learning from Las Vegas was that buildings and cities communicate through signs and symbols, not just through form and structure. The plan asks the viewer to slow down and notice the language of a place that many people might dismiss as tacky, chaotic or too commercial and there’s something very useful about the whole slow travel element there.
I like a bit of urban analysis to keep me engaged and this plan is a snapshot of a Las Vegas long gone. It shows the sign of when Stardust was the world’s largest resort hotel, that casino was demolished decades ago and only a few of the resorts survive today. At least Circus Circus is still there……