riceandweed on Nostr: - Learning From Las Vegas, Robert Venturi Denise Scott Brown Steven Izenour “FROM ...
- Learning From Las Vegas, Robert Venturi Denise Scott Brown Steven Izenour
“FROM ROME TO LAS VEGAS
Las Vegas is the apotheosis of the desert town. Visiting Las Vegas in the mid-l 960s was like visiting Rome in the late 1940s. For young Americans in the 1940s, familiar only with the auto-scaled, gridiron city and the antiurban theories of the previous architectural generation, the traditional urban spaces, the pedestrian scale, and the mixtures, yet continuities, of styles of the Italian piazzas were a significant revelation. They rediscovered the piazza. Two decades later architects are perhaps ready for similar lessons about large open space, big scale, and high speed. Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza.
There are other parallels between Rome and Las Vegas: their expan- sive settings in the Campagna and in the Mojave Desert, for instance, that tend to focus and clarify their images. On the other hand, Las Vegas was built in a day, or rather, the Strip was developed in a virgin desert in a short time. It was not superimposed on an older pattern as were the pilgrim's Rome of the Counter-Reformation and the commercial strips of eastern cities, and it is therefore easier to study. Each city IS an archetype rather than a prototype, an exaggerated example from which to derive lessons for the typical. Each city vividly superimposes elements of a supranational scale on the local fabric: churches in the re- ligious capital, casinos and their signs in the entertainment capital. These cause violent juxtapositions of use and scale in both cities. Rome’s churches,
off streets and piazzas, are open to the public; the pilgrim, religious or architectural, can walk from church to church. The gambler or architect in Las Vegas can similarly take in a variety of casinos along the Strip. The casinos and lobbies of Las Vegas are orna- mental and monumental and open to the promenading public; a few old banks and railroad stations excepted, they are unique in American cities. Nolli's map of the mid-eighteenth century reveals the sensitive an? complex connections between public and private space in Rome 17). Private building is shown in gray crosshatching that is carved mto by the public spaces, exterior and interior.”
“FROM ROME TO LAS VEGAS
Las Vegas is the apotheosis of the desert town. Visiting Las Vegas in the mid-l 960s was like visiting Rome in the late 1940s. For young Americans in the 1940s, familiar only with the auto-scaled, gridiron city and the antiurban theories of the previous architectural generation, the traditional urban spaces, the pedestrian scale, and the mixtures, yet continuities, of styles of the Italian piazzas were a significant revelation. They rediscovered the piazza. Two decades later architects are perhaps ready for similar lessons about large open space, big scale, and high speed. Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza.
There are other parallels between Rome and Las Vegas: their expan- sive settings in the Campagna and in the Mojave Desert, for instance, that tend to focus and clarify their images. On the other hand, Las Vegas was built in a day, or rather, the Strip was developed in a virgin desert in a short time. It was not superimposed on an older pattern as were the pilgrim's Rome of the Counter-Reformation and the commercial strips of eastern cities, and it is therefore easier to study. Each city IS an archetype rather than a prototype, an exaggerated example from which to derive lessons for the typical. Each city vividly superimposes elements of a supranational scale on the local fabric: churches in the re- ligious capital, casinos and their signs in the entertainment capital. These cause violent juxtapositions of use and scale in both cities. Rome’s churches,
off streets and piazzas, are open to the public; the pilgrim, religious or architectural, can walk from church to church. The gambler or architect in Las Vegas can similarly take in a variety of casinos along the Strip. The casinos and lobbies of Las Vegas are orna- mental and monumental and open to the promenading public; a few old banks and railroad stations excepted, they are unique in American cities. Nolli's map of the mid-eighteenth century reveals the sensitive an? complex connections between public and private space in Rome 17). Private building is shown in gray crosshatching that is carved mto by the public spaces, exterior and interior.”