There will be no ruins of Las Vegas. Everything of its previous history is absolutely erased by design. Nothing will be left to uncover, as David Macaulay did in his post-apocalyptic comic, Motel of the Mysteries, which imagined a Howard Carter-like excavation of a roadside motor lodge.

What seemed absolutely contemporary in 1968, when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wandered the Strip (since renamed Las Vegas Boulevard) with an assortment of Yale architecture students, has vanished, like the Stardust Hotel into its imploding cloud.

So there is a reluctant dismay – more like a nostalgia begrudged – that accompanies this Yale exhibition, a composite of two separate retrospectives of work by the architects.

 

There are many small surprises here: the cut paper assemblages presented as architectural drafts in dimensionality, the incorporation of manga technique into the design of a Japanese hotel, a proposed boulevard of giant Disney characters for the French Disneyland, that would have been an unimpeachable rendering of imperialism. And there are a variety of mediations on the charged relationship between drawing and execution, where the former seems to have satisfied them even more than the latter.

There are also indisputable successes among works of theirs that have been realized, such as the Allen Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, in its bright, comic balance with the, “Giant Three Way Plug”, by Claes Oldenburg, an artist for whom they have an obvious and particular kinship.

The walls filled with the visual diary of what they happened on in Nevada over forty years ago reminds us that the raucous energy of that landscape has evolved today into only an inflated parody of itself. These images include something like the haunting documentary of the ordinary that Edward Hopper found in his streets. As he was, they are journalists of memory.

 

But what is on display in these galleries is less important than a reflection on the ideas which inspired the work, especially those which emerged out of the book Learning from Las Vegas. Reading through it again, what’s striking about it is the “modesty” that Scott Brown describes as one of the deep purposes of their exercise. She and Venturi were committed, above all else, to move away from the arrogance of an imposed architecture.

For them, Las Vegas was what the vernacular created when it thought itself imaginative, an untrained fantasy. “Decoration is cheaper,” as they put it, but it also serves to diminish space as a central architectural notion. Las Vegas domesticates the desert, adding brightness to the emptiness. That contrast of the billboard in the desert is not merely ironic. The sign painter alone against the horizon in the Terence Malick film, “Badlands”, is only able to see the world when it becomes a depiction. This is what Venturi means by the symbolic value of making architecture. It has no value if it does not tell us where we are. And we always know that in Las Vegas.

But there is more, and it suggests that while human desires are central to what Venturi and Scott Brown found compelling about Las Vegas, the moral isolation which accompanied them rarely appears. They never ask what it means to walk through a parking lot that has no instructions for pedestrians. And the displays they make the most of are often erased by daylight.

Venturi and Scott Brown’s assertion that, “if you take away the signs, there is no place”,  comes very close to Gertrude Stein’s, ‘there’s no there, there’.  But Stein was looking for where she had lived in Oakland as a child. No one looks for the past in Las Vegas. Or for home.

by Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer

What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates

through February 5 at Yale School of Architecture Gallery

180 York Street, New Haven, CT   203-432-2288

www.architecture.yale.edu

Editor’s Note:  During the late 60’s, Robert Venturi saw Las Vegas as a model for new design, presenting its roadside culture of signs—bright, clashing and ugly—as a vocabulary for contemporary style. 

right: Sheraton Chair for Knoll, 1978-84. Bent laminated wood, plastic laminate with applied pattern, and upholstery. Photograph by Matt Wargo.

He created riotous furniture for Knoll, a range of postmodern chairs that recalled famous historical chair styles from Chippendale, to the moderns. Often silkscreen-printed in bright patterns, the colors reflected the Memphis style of ancient Egypt, all the way to the silkscreen prints of Andy Warhol.

The chairs relied on silhouettes and printed patterns to create their personalities, being otherwise simple, bent plywood constructions. Like stage sets, from the front view the chairs look substantial, but from the side they appear as they are made, simple thin molded plywood forms. Venturi’s chairs embodied the postmodern characteristics of ‘quoting’ other design styles, displaying his furniture as props for deeper ideas and meanings.

Quote from Venturi’s, Learning from Las Vegas (1972): “The mechanical movement of neon lights is quicker than mosaic glitter, which depends on the passage of the sun and the pace of the observer; and the intensity of light on the Strip as well as  the tempo of its movement is greater to accommodate the greater spaces, greater speeds and greater impacts that our technology permits and our sensibilities respond to.”[Learning from Las Vegas, 116]