Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Imparare da Las Vegas, 2010

‘For an architect, learning from the surrounding landscape is a way of being revolutionary… The archetypal Los Angeles will therefore be our Rome, and Las Vegas our Florence.’

When this book was published in 1972, it immediately caused a real uproar: what on earth could one possibly learn from Las Vegas, the organic outlet for American puritanism and the legalised territory run for years by the country’s worst mafias, to the extent that it has influenced cinema, from Coppola’s The Godfather to Scorsese’s Casino? Perhaps to gamble, frequent prostitutes and gigolos, to drink, eat and smoke to excess, perhaps whilst listening to songs like Elvis Presley’s ‘Viva Las Vegas’, or rather to satisfy any base desire in a legal manner? Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour simply decided to study closely a city that had grown at a speed never seen before in the middle of the Mojave Desert like a ‘mirage city’. The neon-lit billboards and its extremely low urban density suggested that Las Vegas was the first example of a virtual city – especially at night – so much so that Tom Wolfe, in one of his early reports, wrote that ‘the signs have become the architecture of Las Vegas’, effectively anticipating the design theory of ‘decorated sheds’ put forward here by the Philadelphia duo. In reality, within a few decades, the capital of vice – also known as Sin City – will be transformed into a much more traditional city surrounded by golf courses, but this study remains paradigmatic because the authors had the courage to look the dragon of triumphant capitalism in the eye at an urban scale, shedding light for the first time on some of the forces underpinning the most disruptive transformations even in old European cities, from sprawl to junkspace: the mass use of the car, neon advertising signs, and the commercial use of new architectural types such as fast food outlets, drive-ins, shopping malls, etc. Giancarlo De Carlo, with extraordinary insight, wrote shortly before the book’s publication that the discovery of Las Vegas and its interpretation in a pop-art key are two events that have ‘broadened the spectrum of human communication because they have introduced into common usage certain forms of expression that until then had been considered irrelevant or even abhorrent […] The discovery of triviality, on the other hand, represents above all a final, irreverent shake-up of the old principle according to which Art is the representation of Beauty’.