 | |
| Author | Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Muriel Cooper |
| Publisher | MIT Press |
Published in English | 1972 |
| ISBN | 978-0-262-22015-6 |
| Website | mitpress |
Learning from Las Vegas is a 1972 book by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Translated into 18 languages, the book helped foster the development of postmodern architecture. [1]
In March 1968, Robert Venturi, writer of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture , and Denise Scott Brown wrote and published "A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas" ( Architectural Forum , March 1968). That following fall, the two created a research studio for graduate students at Yale School of Art and Architecture. The studio was called "Learning from Las Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research". [2]
Izenour, a graduate student in the studio, accompanied his senior tutor colleagues, Venturi and Scott Brown, to Las Vegas in 1968 together with nine students of architecture and four planning and graphics students to study the urban form of the city.
Las Vegas was regarded as a "non-city" and as an outgrowth of a "strip", along which were placed parking lots and singular frontages for gambling casinos, hotels, churches and bars. The research group studied various aspects of the city, including the commercial vernacular, lighting, patterns, styles, and symbolism in the architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown created a taxonomy for the forms, signs, and symbols they encountered. [3] The two were inspired by the emphasis on sign and symbol they found on the Las Vegas strip. The result was a critique of Modern architecture, demonstrated most famously in the comparison between the "duck" and "decorated shed."
The "duck" represents a large part of modernist architecture, which was expressive in form and volume. In contrast, the "decorated shed" relies on imagery and sign. Virtually all architecture before the Modern Movement used decoration to convey meaning, often profound but sometimes simply perfunctory, such as the signage on medieval shop fronts. Only Modernist architecture eschewed such ornament, relying only on corporeal or structural elements to convey meaning. As such, argued the authors, Modern buildings became mute and vacuous, especially when built for corporate or government clients. [2]
Learning from Las Vegas caused a stir in the architectural world upon its publication, as it was hailed by progressive critics for its bold indictment of Modernism, and by the status quo as blasphemous. A split among young American architects occurred during the 1970s, with Izenour, Venturi, Robert A.M. Stern, Charles Moore, and Allan Greenberg defending the book as "The Greys", and Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Michael Graves writing against its premises as "The Whites." It became associated with post-modernism when magazines such as Progressive Architecture published articles citing its influence on the younger generation. Tom Wolfe's often-pilloried book, From Bauhaus to Our House , praises Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour for their stand against heroic Modernism.
From October 29, 2009, to February 5, 2010, "What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio" and "The Work of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates" were exhibited at the Yale School of Architecture gallery, [4] with about 100 photographs taken during the October 1968 trip that would underpin the research by Venturi and Scott Brown. [5] The exhibitions were accompanied by an informational leaflet and interview. [6] "What We Learned" originated at the Museum im Bellpark (Kriens, Switzerland) and had been exhibited at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany. [4]
The authors felt the original 1972 edition was "too monumental for a text that praised the ugly and ordinary over the heroic and monumental" and offered a revised edition, later published as a more modest paperback in 1977. The original 1972 large-format edition was designed by Muriel Cooper for MIT Press and became a design icon in its own right after it fell out of print. In 2017, MIT Press began offering a facsimile edition of the 1972 original with a preface by Denise Scott Brown explaining the reservations the authors had with the original edition. [7] The cost of the first edition was also cited as a reason to allow Mr. Venturi and Ms. Scott Brown to redesign the book. [8]
Robert Charles Venturi Jr. was an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.
The year 1991 in architecture involved some significant architectural events and new buildings.
The year 1972 in architecture involved some significant architectural events and new buildings.
Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the international style advocated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. The movement was formally introduced by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and architectural theorist Robert Venturi in their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas. The style flourished from the 1980s through the 1990s, particularly in the work of Scott Brown & Venturi, Philip Johnson, Charles Moore and Michael Graves. In the late 1990s, it divided into a multitude of new tendencies, including high-tech architecture, neo-futurism, new classical architecture, and deconstructivism. However, some buildings built after this period are still considered postmodern.
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The Yale School of Architecture (YSoA) is one of the constituent professional schools of Yale University. The School awards the degrees of Master of Architecture I, Master of Architecture II, Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D), and Ph.D in architectural history and criticism. The School also offers joint degrees with the Yale School of Management and Yale School of the Environment, as well as a course of study for undergraduates in Yale College leading to a Bachelor of Arts. Since its founding as a department in 1916, the School has produced some of the world's leading architects, including Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Maya Lin and Eero Saarinen, among others. The current dean of the School is Deborah Berke.
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Denise Scott Brown is an American architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia.
Interest in the Architecture of Las Vegas began in the late 1960s, when in 1967 architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown traveled to the city accompanied by students in order to study its architecture. They wrote, with Steven Izenour, a report in 1972 on the subject entitled Learning From Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. This report, and its thesis that Las Vegas showed the way for architecture in the late 20th century, drew the attention of the architectural world to the city. A quarter of a century later, for a BBC program Venturi and Scott Brown revisited the city, and revised their opinions.
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The Vanna Venturi House, one of the first prominent works of the postmodern architecture movement, is located in the neighborhood of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was designed by architect Robert Venturi for his mother, Vanna Venturi, and built between 1962 and 1964.
Steven Izenour was an American architect, urbanist and theorist. He is best known as co-author, with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, of Learning from Las Vegas, one of the most influential architectural theory books of the twentieth century. He was also a principal in the Philadelphia firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates.
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Guild House is a residential building in Philadelphia which is an important and influential work of 20th-century architecture and was the first major work by Robert Venturi. Along with the Vanna Venturi House it is considered to be one of the earliest expressions of Postmodern architecture, and helped establish Venturi as one of the leading architects of the 20th century.
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Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is a 1978 book, written by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. The book serves as a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan between 1850 and 1960, analyzing the development of architecture and urban design throughout New York's history from the founding of New Amsterdam by the Dutch, to the design of the Headquarters of the United Nations by Le Corbusier. Rem Koolhaas describes the concept of 'Manhattanism', the theory of the creation and functioning of the city of New York, at length in the book.
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