Looking through the rearview mirror, Denise Scott-Brown reflects on and questions Las Vegas.
Denise Scott Brown in Las Vegas in 1966. Main photograph: Robert Venturi/Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. / Portrait: Frank Hanswijk
Is it really my kind of town? Perhaps.
Neon is in my earliest memories, starting with Johannesburg’s 50th Jubilee celebrations in 1936. That year grandparents brought trinkets from a distant Coney Island and pretty Coronation memorabilia followed in 1937. In the 1940s our family holidayed on the beach and promenade at Muizenberg, our Atlantic City. So a resort and carnival ethos imprinted my psyche well before 1950 when my parents returned from the US with movies of Las Vegas lights.
But in another sense, no. My Quaker husband and I don’t gamble. As architects for academic and public institutions, we have never been employed by Las Vegas. And certainly not all its — or any other city’s — lessons can be derived from The Strip. Yet we learn from the architecture and urbanism of gaming as we do from gothic cathedrals, despite our revulsion at the Crusades. Our professional heritage takes us there too. Modernism, notwithstanding its focus on abstraction, admonished us to learn from industrial architecture, and the Brutalists and social planners promoted study of life as lived in London’s East End, Boston’s West End and the commercial and residential architecture of urban sprawl. Next came the auto-based cities of the American south-west. Our journey there was accompanied by the Pop artists and Tom Wolfe and supported by decades of Modernist studies of vision and motion.
Visiting Las Vegas first in January 1965, I felt a shiver — was it hate or love? On its everyday strips buildings merged with the desert as their polychromatic signs etched themselves against blue sky with the precision of Greek temples. But The Strip was different. Its improbable urbanism apotheosised the commercial environment. I knew it would be an aesthetic turning point for me and, after several more visits, invited Robert Venturi in 1966 to share my discoveries. In 1968 we ran our ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ studio. The city taught us profound lessons on iconography, perception and communication, yet this was only one aspect of our study. Sadly, others went unnoticed. But young architects and students today understand how our approach has both social and aesthetic components. Learning from Las Vegas is still in print in many languages and, if Russian visitors recognise the dismembered Stardust sign at the Neon Museum, curators tell us it’s because they have read our book.
In 1997, bundled in a red convertible in the frozen desert night, we documented our reaction to Las Vegas 25 years after LLV appeared. Steven Wynn was then ridding The Strip of neon, replacing signs with Disneyland scenography and converting parking parterres to pedestrian forecourts. This was needed, he felt, to help the city grow beyond its single industry. But reducing its scale and obliterating its history eroded The Strip’s vitality. And with the neon went the communication system we had analysed. The new Las Vegas had little to teach us, and this only worsened as NeoMo followed. We left Las Vegas feeling depressed.
In June 2009 we returned, this time to 100 degree heat and a white convertible that brought whistles and wishes for a happy honeymoon. Though two days gave little time to form opinions, Las Vegas seemed better. As the city became the fastest growing in the US, dense development replaced The Strip’s thin line. Las Vegas Boulevard began to share the exuberance of Tokyo and Shanghai. All are ‘cities of a 1000 designers’ where strong individuals have worked, not necessarily in unison, to produce a strange unity and that combination of passion, vitality and shock that we call terribilita. Las Vegas growth is larger-scaled and more orderly than the skyrocketing Tokyo of the 1950s, and although Shanghai’s Pudong district and Las Vegas Boulevard both suggest fairyland at a distance, Pudong’s local streets are a nightmare for pedestrians while Las Vegas casino forecourts are grand slams where Paris, Venice and New York entice you in. Terribilita is achieved by computer. Photoshop collages Venice’s vivid experiences to produce more laciness than is found in any one place in the real city. Eat your heart out Paris – the Eiffel Tower has been dumped on the Opéra.
Parking is out front again, jammed in with the icons but visible from the road. A monorail glides between unknown destinations. But does it go where needed, relieve congestion and enliven the city? And neon is back. On our last visit we heard sad forecasts of its demise but had high hopes for LED, which was expected to leave the rectangle and follow neon’s flowing lines. But today’s LED whatever its size looks constricted and pale. An earlier calamity was the removal of Freemont Street neon. As if the street where Las Vegas began didn’t have enough troubles, it was further crippled by removing its legendary lights and adding a barrel-vault projection screen over it. This destroyed its main defences – historic buildings and open sky. Today’s films on the vault are at least brighter than they were and restored antique signs added to street medians beyond the screen raise interesting debate on whether civic neon should be different from commercial neon.
Denise Scott Brown is principal in Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates – whose recent projects include campus planning for Tsinghua University in Beijing – educator and co-author of Learning From Las Vegas.
This article was published in AT200 / July-August 09, p104
