Learning from Las Vegas, originally published by the MIT Press in1972, was one of the most influential and controversial architectural books of its era. Forty yearslater, it remains a perennial bestseller and a definitive theoretical text. Its authors--architectsRobert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour--famously used the Las Vegas Strip to arguethe virtues of the "ordinary and ugly" above the "heroic and original" qualitiesof architectural modernism. Learning from Las Vegas not only moved architectureto the center of cultural debates, it changed our ideas about what architecture was and could be. Inthis provocative rereading of an iconic text, Aron Vinegar argues that to read Learningfrom Las Vegas only as an exemplary postmodernist text--to understand it, for example, asa call for pastiche or as ironic provocation--is to underestimate its deeper critical and ethicalmeaning, and to miss the underlying dialectic between skepticism and the ordinary, expression andthe deadpan, that runs through the text. Especially revealing is Vinegar's close analysis of thedifferences between the first 1972 edition, designed for the MIT Press by Muriel Cooper, and the"revised" edition of 1977, which was radically stripped down and largely redesigned byDenise Scott Brown.
Rereading one of the most influential architectural books of the twentiethcentury--as intellectual project, graphic design landmark, and prescient introduction to issues ofconcern today.
