The second half of Learning from Las Vegas is a polemic (generally a polite one) against Rudolph and other myrmidons of the Swiss master theorizer and charlatan Le Corbusier. Modernist architects sneered at commercial strips as tacky, simplistic, and bourgeois. Venturi et al. pitted the unruly architecture of Las Vegas (most of it designed by private businessmen) against the logical, doctrinaire architecture of the academic modernists (most of it designed for the public sector) as a way of showing up the latter. What makes Learning from Las Vegas so fascinating is this trick of deploying one kind of crap to discredit another.
Las Vegas is disorienting, and disorienting in a way that can be expected to generate bad architecture. Very fast automobile traffic is to blame. On highway off-ramps, you turn right to go left, Venturi notes. A person can no longer trust his sense of where he is and where he is going; he needs to be told. In Las Vegas, signs perform this function. What they tell you is to enter this or that casino. They need to do this as simply as possible, since the readers of those signs are operating a dangerous piece of machinery at 70 mph. So complex manipulations of space, the modernists’ bread and butter, were out of the question. Symbolism had to be blunt, unchallenging, and appeal to some prejudice or preconception: Roman columns on Caesars Palace, an Arabian lamp on Aladdin’s. Nothing could be tackier.
It is in the course of defending this tackiness–or as he would put it, “messy vitality”–that Venturi wheels around to make his frontal attack on modernism. Las Vegas’s symbols look cheap and inauthentic, but this does not mean they are newfangled. Oddly enough, something reconnects them to the historical allusions of 19th-century eclecticism, when Tudor and Queen Anne thrived in England and Renaissance was the style of choice in France. “Banks were Classical basilicas to suggest civic responsibility and tradition; commercial buildings looked like burghers’ houses; universities copied Gothic rather than Classical colleges at Oxford and Cambridge,” wrote Venturi. “The hamburger-shaped hamburger stand is a current, more literal attempt to express function via association.” Sometimes he calls the language of Las Vegas architecture “heraldic.”
