Learning From Las Vegas

MOST PEOPLE GO to Las Vegas to gamble. Some need the convenience of a wedding chapel that will accept Mastercharge. A few might enjoy the nickel slot machines. However, there have probably been very few people in the history of Las Vegas who have cruised the Strip to study its architecture.

Robert Venturi, a professor of architecture at Yale, his wife, and twelve architecture students visited the city in the fall of 1968 to study the strip as a part of a studio course that Venturi was teaching at Yale. Given free room and board at the Stardust Hotel, the finest on the strip, a reduction in the hourly price for the use of a Howard Hughes helicopter, and the company of an official of the electric sign company, the group spent ten days in Las Vegas in an attempt to document and analyze urban sprawl. Fearing that the civic beautification commission would turn the strip into a Western Champs-Elysses by obscuring the neon signs with trees or that the local planning board would prevail upon gas station owners to imitate the architecture of the casinos in the interest of architectural unity, Venturi and group hurried to sing its praises. The results of the study as well as an essay on the symbolism of sprawl and another on the work of Venturi and Rauch as practicing architects make up Venturi's latest book. Learning from Las Vegas.

Venturi's ideas must be understood as representing a revolt against much of contemporary architecture. His book is an attack on those high-handed architects who see themselves as setting standards of architectural excellence. They fill our landscape with imposing, heroic forms which are all too familiar--a Gund Hall, a new Science Center, or a Boston City Hall. Venturi is interested in the sort of architecture that has no pretension to being heroic. He implies that there is nothing to be learned from these self-conscious monuments to good taste. Rather he looks to the more low-brow, eclectic architecture of the strip as a source of style. Not pure Bauhaus but Bauhaus Hawaiian, Yamasaki-Bernini, and International Jet Set.

Venturi revels in the forms of the gambling casinos. For him the front colonnade of Caesar's Palace becomes like St. Peter's in Rome; the blue and, gold mosaic work like the Early Christian tomb of Galia Placidia; the cypresses in the parking lot like the Villa D'Este; and the statue of David near the entrance, although having slight anatomical exaggerations, like the Palazzo Vecchio in Rome. Venturi's sense of imagination even allows him to see the A&P parking lot in terms of the gardens at Versailles. The parking lines give direction in a vast, expansion space in the same way that the paving patterns and shrubbery guide movement at Versailles.

YET HOWEVER FASCINATING Las Vegas'n architecture, and even its parking lots, may be in an environment of enormous spaces and high speeds, architectural form is not enough to attract attention. Signs in Las Vegas compensate for what the buildings may lack in commercial persuasion. And Venturi takes great pains to study them carefully. Some work as polychrome sculpture in the day and sources of light at night; one revolves another is twenty-two stories high; one even says "Howdy Pardner" every thirty seconds. And again the authors find historical parallels. These signs of Las Vegas have their precedents in the sculptural programs on the west facades of Chartres and Notre Dame; both announce the purpose of the building.

Venturi's aptitude for making such outrageous comparisons between great buildings of the past and those of the strip add humor and flair to the writing. But this humor belies the intense seriousness of his message. Venturi wants people to believe that not only is urban sprawl worth understanding but that new techniques should be developed to analyze it. Pages upon pages are filled with land use plans, maps locating churches and auto rental establishments, maps indicating illumination levels on the strip, traffic studies, and plans of gas stations. Other pages are laid out in magnificent collages of various photographs to suggest more intangible qualities of night-time animation or a feel for driving down the strip at 70 miles an hour. And much of the language is quite technical planning jargon. Phrases such as vehicular behavior or scales of movement punctuate the writing. The amount of verbal effort and fancy graphic display that he uses to describe the relation of the signs to the buildings, the buildings themselves, and the parking lots seem intended to force an admission--the strip should be an inspiration for all future architecture in this country.

Most people will agree that the strip in an extremely functional solution to an environment of high-speed automobiles such as Las Vegas, that requires the heighted visibility of signs and rather low-profile buildings. But somehow Venturi mistakes an architecture useful for commercial purposes in Las Vegas as being an architecture that reflects a middle-class aesthetic and consequently should be extended for residential and institutional use.

Venturi's arguments in the rest of the book for the ordinary--as opposed to the heroic--in architecture as exemplified by the commercial buildings of the strip, are based on the belief that the strip, as well as places like Levittown, ultimately represent the aesthetic preferences of the middle class. And why, asks Venturi, should anyone attempt to elevate a client's value system with reference to Art or Metaphysics? Of course, Venturi knows that an architect such as I.M. pei who caters to elite tastes would never be happy on the strip. However, he assumes that everyone else would.

APPARENTLY IT NEVER occurs to Venturi that most people just might not find Las Vegas very attractive. More importantly, his insistence on analyzing the strip as simply a pretty visual image leads him to exclude many of the factors that have given rise to such an environment. He relishes the effects and ignores the causes. And his pleas to the reader to let him analyze his images to the exclusion of social issues only make it harder to be lenient.

Because of this attitude of acceptance--indeed glorification--of the existing system to strip development as a perfectly legitimate middle-class aesthetic, critics have dubbed Venturi the "Nixonite" of architecture. Yet however attractive he might make the strip appear in a book whose layout is so elaborate that the price can be no lower than $25, the strip without a doubt still represents one of the ugliest environments that has ever existed. It is easy for Venturi to avoid questions such as why acres of landscape have to be covered with asphalt for parking lots, why the construction of such enormous signs as overt displays of competition for the consumer's money, and why such dependence on the car when parking lots can be made to seem like Versailles and gambling halls like the Vatican. Indeed it is the commercial interests of gas station owners, short-order hamburger corporations, and gambling joints and not, as Venturi would like us to believe, the desires of the great middle class that have produced such a blighted landscape. It is not difficult to agree that places like Park Avenue with its multitude of sleek skyscrapers or the plaza at City Hall need a greater sense of vitality and human scale. However, Venturi looks forward to complete self-abasement in architecture. In the end perhaps he belongs in the same category as those high-class New Yorkers who hurried to fill their collections with Pop art in the early 60's. It is an elite that can glorify the imagery of the strip and appreciate its folksiness. In fact they can produce fancy books about it, but of course they would never live there.