LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS

Revised Edition

Robert Venturi Denise Scott Brown Steven Izenour

Ninth printing, 1988

$\copyright$ 1977, 1972 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published as Learning from Las Vegas

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in IBM Composer Baskerville by Techdata Associates, printed on R&E Book by Murray Printing Company, and bound by Murray Printing Company in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Venturi, Robert.

Learning from Las Vegas.

Bibliography: p.

1. Architecture—Nevada—Las Vegas. 2. Symbolism in architecture. I. Scott Brown, Denise, 1931-, joint author. II. Izenour, Steven, joint author. III. Title. NA735.L3V4 1977 720.9793'13 77-1917 ISBN 0-262-22020-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 0-262-72006-X (paperback)

Explicit and Implicit Associations 90 Heroic and Original, or Ugly and Ordinary 91 Ornament: Signs and Symbols, Denotation and Connotation, Heraldry and Physiognomy, Meaning and Expression 92 Is Boring Architecture Interesting? 93 HISTORICAL AND OTHER PRECEDENTS: TOWARDS AN OLD ARCHITECTURE 104 Historical Symbolism and Modern Architecture 104 The Cathedral as Duck and Shed 105 Symbolic Evolution in Las Vegas 106 The Renaissance and the Decorated Shed 106 Nineteenth-Century Eclecticism 107 Modern Ornament 114 Ornament and Interior Space 115 The Las Vegas Strip 116 Urban Sprawl and the Megastructure 117 THEORY OF UGLY AND ORDINARY AND RELATED AND CONTRARY THEORIES 128 Origins and Further Definition of Ugly and Ordinary 128 Ugly and Ordinary as Symbol and Style 129 Against Ducks, or Ugly and Ordinary over Heroic and Original, or Think Little 130 Theories of Symbolism and Association in Architecture 131 Firmness + Commodity ≠ Delight: Modern Architecture and the Industrial Vernacular 134 Industrial Iconography 135 Industrial Styling and the Cubist Model 136 Symbolism Unadmitted 137 From La Tourette to Neiman-Marcus 138 Slavish Formalism and Articulated Expressionism 138 Articulation as Ornament 139 Space as God 148 Megastructures and Design Control 148 Misplaced Technological Zeal 150 Which Technological Revolution? 151 Preindustrial Imagery for a Postindustrial Era 151

tecture and our particular interest in finding graphic means, more suitable than those now used by architects and planners, to describe "urban sprawl" urbanism and particularly the commercial strip.

Las Vegas met our project with courtesy and helpfulness at the technical, planning agency level and with courtesy and unhelpfulness at the decision making level. No funds were available at city or county hall, and the chairman of the Strip Beautification Committee felt that Yale should pay Las Vegas to make the study. The day of our arrival a local paper announced, "Yale Professor Will Praise Strip for $8,925." A few days later when, still hopeful, we requested a further sum for the making of a film, the newspaper rebounded, "Yale Professor Ups Price to Praise Strip." The nearest we came to official financial support was a reduction in the hourly price on the use of Mr. Howard Hughes's helicopter.

Our ideas too were met with polite skepticism, and we gathered that the Beautification Committee would continue to recommend turning the Strip into a western Champs Elysées, obscuring the signs with trees and raising the humidity level with giant fountains, and that the local planning and zoning agencies would continue to try to persuade the gasoline stations to imitate the architecture of the casinos, in the interest of architectural unity.

On the other hand, the Stardust Hotel, one of the finest on the Strip, gave us all free board and lodging. The car rental agencies combined to give us a week's free use of a car. And the Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO), in particular Mr. Vaughan Cannon, constituted itself our chief host and helper in Las Vegas. In addition, we are grateful to Mr. Jerry Litman, then of the Las Vegas Sun, for trying to give our study a more friendly press. And finally, to the much-respected Las Vegas citizen who took one female Yale professor to the gala opening of the Circus Circus Casino, legally, and wangled, semilegally, an entry to this social highlight for the whole class—attired to meet the situation in Day-Glo-decorated castoffs from the local Salvation Army Store.

The temptation is great to augment the list of thank-yous to include all those to whom three people feel warmly grateful for help in their intellectual lives. The following list has been culled from that much larger list to include those who have been the particular intellectual and artistic underpinnings of this project. They are the late Donald Drew Egbert, Herbert J. Gans, J. B. Jackson, Louis Kahn, Arthur Korn, Jean Labatut, Esther McCoy, Robert B. Mitchell, Charles Moore, Lewis Mumford, the Pop artists (particularly Edward Ruscha), Vincent Scully, Charles Seeger, Melvin M. Webber, and Tom Wolfe. With some temerity we acknowledge too the help of Michelangelo, the Italian and English Mannerists, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Patrick Geddes, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the early generations of Heroic Modern architects.

Rauch for typing the manuscript. And finally Steven Izenour, who is our co-worker, co-author, and sine qua non.

Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi Calivigny Island, W. I.

my contribution and at attributions in general by architects and journalists led me to analyze the social structure of the profession, its domination by upper-class males, and the emphasis its members place upon the architectural star system. The result is an article entitled "Sexism and the Star System in Architecture."

Source information on these and other articles may be found in the Venturi and Rauch bibliography which has been added to this edition. This list of writings by members of the firm and others is the most complete we have. We welcome information on anything we have omitted.

Since the publication of this book our thoughts on symbolism in architecture have been developed through several different projects. The Yale architecture studio that gave rise to Learning from Las Vegas was followed the next year by a study of architectural symbolism in residential suburbia, entitled “Remedial Housing for Architects, or Learning from Levittown.” This material forms part of “Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City,” a Bicentennial exhibition we designed for the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution at the Renwick Gallery. In similar vein, an article, “Symbols, Signs and Aesthetics: Architectural Taste in a Pluralist Society,” comments on the social content of architectural symbolism and on the relation of architects to the different taste cultures of our society; and another, “Architecture as Shelter with Decoration on It,” amplifies our theories on symbolism.

Questions of architectural pedagogy were of great concern in the two Yale projects but were merely hinted at in Learning from Las Vegas. In this revised version the parallel text of studio notes has been removed to a separate section and keyed to the Part I text. In this form it reestablishes something of its original identity. Further thoughts on architectural pedagogy, research, and studio are expounded in an article entitled “On Formal Analysis as Design Research, with Some Notes on Studio Pedagogy.”

Publications on our architectural work are listed in the bibliography. Fairly recent broad-scale coverage has been given our firm in two issues of Japanese Architecture and Urbanism.

In the nine years since our study was initiated, Las Vegas and the Strip have changed too. Some buildings have new wings and restyled facades. Some signs are no longer there. Delicate and intense neon high readers have given way to bland, white, plastic, rear-illuminated message boards that alter the scale and vitality of Strip ornament. Portes cocheres now vie with signs as bearers of symbolic information.

We sense that the ideas initiated in Learning from Las Vegas are receiving much greater acceptance than when they were first published. We feel too that architects, bar a few diehards, are coming to realize that what we learned from Las Vegas, and what they by implication

1

communication. Just as an analysis of the structure of a Gothic cathedral need not include a debate on the morality of medieval religion, so Las Vegas's values are not questioned here. The morality of commercial advertising, gambling interests, and the competitive instinct is not at issue here, although, indeed, we believe it should be in the architect's broader, synthetic tasks of which an analysis such as this is but one aspect. The analysis of a drive-in church in this context would match that of a drive-in restaurant, because this is a study of method, not content. Analysis of one of the architectural variables in isolation from the others is a respectable scientific and humanistic activity, so long as all are resynthesized in design. Analysis of existing American urbanism is a socially desirable activity to the extent that it teaches us architects to be more understanding and less authoritarian in the plans we make for both inner-city renewal and new development. In addition, there is no reason why the methods of commercial persuasion and the skyline of signs analyzed here should not serve the purpose of civic and cultural enhancement. But this is not entirely up to the architect.

BILLBOARDS ARE ALMOST ALL RIGHT

Architects who can accept the lessons of primitive vernacular architecture, so easy to take in an exhibit like “Architecture without Architects,” and of industrial, vernacular architecture, so easy to adapt to an electronic and space vernacular as elaborate neo-Brutalist or neo-Constructivist megastructures, do not easily acknowledge the validity of the commercial vernacular. For the artist, creating the new may mean choosing the old or the existing. Pop artists have relearned this. Our acknowledgment of existing, commercial architecture at the scale of the highway is within this tradition.

Modern architecture has not so much excluded the commercial vernacular as it has tried to take it over by inventing and enforcing a vernacular of its own, improved and universal. It has rejected the combination of fine art and crude art. The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere's laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

ARCHITECTURE AS SPACE

Architects have been bewitched by a single element of the Italian landscape: the piazza. Its traditional, pedestrian-scaled, and intricately enclosed space is easier to like than the spatial sprawl of Route 66 and with an occasional assist, as Alan Colquhoun has suggested, $^{2}$ from intuition.

But some recent critics have questioned the possible level of content to be derived from abstract forms. Others have demonstrated that the functionalists, despite their protestations, derived a formal vocabulary of their own, mainly from current art movements and the industrial vernacular; and latter-day followers such as the Archigram group have turned, while similarly protesting, to Pop Art and the space industry. However, most critics have slighted a continuing iconology in popular commercial art, the persuasive heraldry that pervades our environment from the advertising pages of The New Yorker to the superbillboards of Houston. And their theory of the “debasement” of symbolic architecture in nineteenth-century eclecticism has blinded them to the value of the representational architecture along highways. Those who acknowledge this roadside eclecticism denigrate it, because it flaunts the cliché of a decade ago as well as the style of a century ago. But why not? Time travels fast today.

The Miami Beach Modern motel on a bleak stretch of highway in southern Delaware reminds jaded drivers of the welcome luxury of a tropical resort, persuading them, perhaps, to forgo the gracious plantation across the Virginia border called Motel Monticello. The real hotel in Miami alludes to the international stylishness of a Brazilian resort, which, in turn, derives from the International Style of middle Corbu. This evolution from the high source through the middle source to the low source took only 30 years. Today, the middle source, the neo-Eclectic architecture of the 1940s and the 1950s, is less interesting than its commercial adaptations. Roadside copies of Ed Stone are more interesting than the real Ed Stone.

SYMBOL IN SPACE BEFORE FORM IN SPACE: LAS VEGAS AS A COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

The sign for the Motel Monticello, a silhouette of an enormous Chippendale highboy, is visible on the highway before the motel itself. This architecture of styles and signs is antispatial; it is an architecture of communication over space; communication dominates space as an element in the architecture and in the landscape (Figs. 1-6). But it is for a new scale of landscape. The philosophical associations of the old eclecticism evoked subtle and complex meanings to be savored in the docile spaces of a traditional landscape. The commercial persuasion of roadside eclecticism provokes bold impact in the vast and complex setting of a new landscape of big spaces, high speeds, and complex programs.

2. Alan Colquhoun, “Typology and Design Method,” Arena, Journal of the Architectural Association (June 1967), pp. 11-14.

3. Dunes Casino and Hotel, Las Vegas

4. Wedding chapel, Las Vegas

5. Stardust Casino and Hotel, Las Vegas

10. Tanya billboard on the Strip

11. Lower Strip, looking north

VAST SPACE SPACE-SCALE

SPACE·SCALE·SPEED·SYMBOL

12. A comparative analysis of vast spaces

13. Aladdin Casino and Hotel, Las Vegas

Western stores did the same thing: They were bigger and taller than the interiors they fronted to communicate the store's importance and to enhance the quality and unity of the street. But false fronts are of the order and scale of Main Street. From the desert town on the highway in the West of today, we can learn new and vivid lessons about an impure architecture of communication. The little low buildings, gray-brown like the desert, separate and recede from the street that is now the highway, their false fronts disengaged and turned perpendicular to the highway as big, high signs. If you take the signs away, there is no place. The desert town is intensified communication along the highway.

FROM ROME TO LAS VEGAS

Las Vegas is the apotheosis of the desert town. Visiting Las Vegas in the mid-1960s was like visiting Rome in the late 1940s. For young Americans in the 1940s, familiar only with the auto-scaled, gridiron city and the antiurban theories of the previous architectural generation, the traditional urban spaces, the pedestrian scale, and the mixtures, yet continuities, of styles of the Italian piazzas were a significant revelation. They rediscovered the piazza. Two decades later architects are perhaps ready for similar lessons about large open space, big scale, and high speed. Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza.

There are other parallels between Rome and Las Vegas: their expansive settings in the Campagna and in the Mojave Desert, for instance, that tend to focus and clarify their images. On the other hand, Las Vegas was built in a day, or rather, the Strip was developed in a virgin desert in a short time. It was not superimposed on an older pattern as were the pilgrim's Rome of the Counter-Reformation and the commercial strips of eastern cities, and it is therefore easier to study. Each city is an archetype rather than a prototype, an exaggerated example from which to derive lessons for the typical. Each city vividly superimposes elements of a supranational scale on the local fabric: churches in the religious capital, casinos and their signs in the entertainment capital. These cause violent juxtapositions of use and scale in both cities. Rome's churches, off streets and piazzas, are open to the public; the pilgrim, religious or architectural, can walk from church to church. The gambler or architect in Las Vegas can similarly take in a variety of casinos along the Strip. The casinos and lobbies of Las Vegas are ornamental and monumental and open to the promenading public; a few old banks and railroad stations excepted, they are unique in American cities. Nolli's map of the mid-eighteenth century reveals the sensitive and complex connections between public and private space in Rome (Fig. 17). Private building is shown in gray crosshatching that is carved into by the public spaces, exterior and interior. These spaces, open or

bolic. This contrasts with the Strip, where a second and later development of casinos extends southward to the airport, the jet-scale entrance to town (Figs. 23, 24, 42, 43, 52, 54).

One’s first introduction to Las Vegas architecture is a forebear of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal, which is the local airport building. Beyond this piece of architectural image, impressions are scaled to the car rented at the airport. Here is the unraveling of the famous Strip itself, which, as Route 91, connects the airport with the downtown (Fig. 33).

§ SYSTEM AND ORDER ON THE STRIP

The image of the commercial strip is chaos. The order in this landscape is not obvious (Fig. 34). The continuous highway itself and its systems for turning are absolutely consistent. The median strip accommodates the U-turns necessary to a vehicular promenade for casino crawlers as well as left turns onto the local street pattern that the Strip intersects. The curbing allows frequent right turns for casinos and other commercial enterprises and eases the difficult transitions from highway to parking. The streetlights function superfluously along many parts of the Strip that are incidentally but abundantly lit by signs, but their consistency of form and position and their arching shapes begin to identify by day a continuous space of the highway, and the constant rhythm contrasts effectively with the uneven rhythms of the signs behind (Fig. 35).

This counterpoint reinforces the contrast between two types of order on the Strip: the obvious visual order of street elements and the difficult visual order of buildings and signs. The zone of the highway is a shared order. The zone off the highway is an individual order (Fig. 36). The elements of the highway are civic. The buildings and signs are private. In combination they embrace continuity and discontinuity, going and stopping, clarity and ambiguity, cooperation and competition, the community and rugged individualism. The system of the highway gives order to the sensitive functions of exit and entrance, as well as to the image of the Strip as a sequential whole. It also generates places for individual enterprises to grow and controls the general direction of that growth. It allows variety and change along its sides and accommodates the contrapuntal, competitive order of the individual enterprises.

There is an order along the sides of the highway. Varieties of activities are juxtaposed on the Strip: service stations, minor motels, and multimillion-dollar casinos. Marriage chapels (“credit cards accepted”) converted from bungalows with added neon-lined steeples are apt to appear anywhere toward the downtown end. Immediate proximity of related uses, as on Main Street, where you walk from one store to another, is

8. Aerial photograph of upper Strip

9a. Upper strip, undeveloped land

19b. Asphalt

19c. Autos

COMPARATIVE ACTIVITY PATTERNS: CHURCHES

COMPARATIVE ACTIVITY PATTERNS: FOOD STORES

24-27. Maps showing comparative activity patterns: distribution of churches, food stores, wedding chapels, auto rentals

Map of Las Vegas Strip (detail) showing every written word seen from the road

31. Fremont Street

33. A detail from an “Edward Ruscha” elevation of the Strip. Tourist maps are made of the Grand Canal and the Rhine showing the route lined by its palaces. Ruscha made one of the Sunset Strip. We imitated his for the Las Vegas Strip.

not required along the Strip because interaction is by car and highway. You drive from one casino to another even when they are adjacent because of the distance between them, and an intervening service station is not disagreeable.

CHANGE AND PERMANENCE ON THE STRIP

The rate of obsolescence of a sign seems to be nearer to that of an automobile than that of a building. The reason is not physical degeneration but what competitors are doing around you. The leasing system operated by the sign companies and the possibility of total tax write-off may have something to do with it. The most unique, most monumental parts of the Strip, the signs and casino facades, are also the most changeable; it is the neutral, systems-motel structures behind that survive a succession of facelifts and a series of themes up front. The Aladdin Hotel and Casino is Moorish in front and Tudor behind (Fig. 13).

Las Vegas’s greatest growth has been since World War II (Figs. 37-40). There are noticeable changes every year: new hotels and signs as well as neon-embossed parking structures replacing on-lot parking on and behind Fremont Street. Like the agglomeration of chapels in a Roman church and the stylistic sequence of piers in a Gothic cathedral, the Golden Nugget casino has evolved over 30 years from a building with a sign on it to a totally sign-covered building (Fig. 41). The Stardust Hotel has engulfed a small restaurant and a second hotel in its expansion and has united the three-piece facade with 600 feet of computer-programmed animated neon.

§ THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE STRIP

It is hard to think of each flamboyant casino as anything but unique, and this is as it should be, because good advertising technique requires the differentiation of the product. However, these casinos have much in common because they are under the same sun, on the same Strip, and perform similar functions; they differ from other casinos—say, on Fremont Street—and from other hotels that are not casinos (Figs. 42, 43).

A typical hotel-casino complex contains a building that is near enough to the highway to be seen from the road across the parked cars, yet far enough back to accommodate driveways, turnarounds, and parking. The parking in front is a token: It reassures the customer but does not obscure the building. It is prestige parking: The customer pays. The bulk of the parking, along the sides of the complex, allows direct access to the hotel yet stays visible from the highway. Parking is seldom at the back. The scales of movement and space of the highway relate to the

34. The order in this landscape is not obvious.

37. Las Vegas, August 1905

38. Las Vegas, Fremont Street, 1910

TYPES OF CHANGE

(A) Lagersings & Facades & Plans to expand spatially & stylistically ① Standout Hotel, facade (by designers)

② gothic cathedrals (by generations)

B Competitive Increase in Sign and Symbols ① Las Vegas Signs

② San Gimignano Towers

C The Strip becomes a Place ① Convention Center & International Hotel

② The Shopping Center

D Building becomes Sign ① the Green Knight

the Evolution of Paleway in "Main Street"

The green knight on the right

Paleway on sheet dense structure sparse painting

smoking in hotel sparse environment dense redding

meeting in big (in groups) dense environment "pavement"

Change and Permanence

42. A schedule of Las Vegas Strip hotels: plans, sections, and elements

43. A schedule of Las Vegas Strip hotels: elements, continued

4.6. V. 6.6. 6.6. 6.

4.8. V. 4.8. 4.8. 4.

is the princely enclosure of the Alhambra, and it is the apotheosis of all the motel courts with swimming pools more symbolic than useful, the plain, low restaurants with exotic interiors, and the pretty shopping malls of the American strip.

ARCHITECTURAL MONUMENTALITY AND THE BIG, LOW SPACE

The casino in Las Vegas is big, low space. It is the archetype for all public interior spaces whose heights are diminished for reasons of budget and air conditioning. (The low, one-way-mirrored ceilings also permit outside observation of the gambling rooms.) In the past, volume was governed by structural span; height was relatively easy to achieve. Today, span is easy to achieve, and volume is governed by mechanical and economic limitations on height. But railroad stations, restaurants, and shopping arcades only ten feet high reflect as well a changing attitude to monumentality in our environment. In the past, big spans with their concomitant heights were an ingredient of architectural monumentality (Fig. 53). But our monuments are not the occasional tour de force of an Astrodome, a Lincoln Center, or a subsidized airport. These merely prove that big, high spaces do not automatically make architectural monumentality. We have replaced the monumental space of Pennsylvania Station by a subway above ground, and that of Grand Central Terminal remains mainly through its magnificent conversion to an advertising vehicle. Thus, we rarely achieve architectural monumentality when we try; our money and skill do not go into the traditional monumentality that expressed cohesion of the community through big-scale, unified, symbolic, architectural elements. Perhaps we should admit that our cathedrals are the chapels without the nave and that, apart from theaters and ball parks, the occasional communal space that is big is a space for crowds of anonymous individuals without explicit connection with each other. The big, low mazes of the dark restaurant with alcoves combine being together and yet separate as does the Las Vegas casino. The lighting in the casino achieves a new monumentality for the low space. The controlled sources of artificial and colored light within the dark enclosures expand and unify the space by obscuring its physical limits. You are no longer in the bounded piazza but in the twinkling lights of the city at night.

§ LAS VEGAS STYLES

The Las Vegas casino is a combination form. The complex program of Caesars Palace—one of the grandest—includes gambling, dining and banqueting rooms, nightclubs and auditoria, stores, and a complete

blocks away. Signs in Las Vegas use mixed media—words, pictures, and sculpture—to persuade and inform. A sign is, contradictorily, for day and night. The same sign works as polychrome sculpture in the sun and as black silhouette against the sun; at night it is a source of light. It revolves by day and becomes a play of lights at night (Figs. 64-67). It contains scales for close-up and for distance (Fig. 68). Las Vegas has the longest sign in the world, the Thunderbird, and the highest, the Dunes. Some signs are hardly distinguishable at a distance from the occasional high-rise hotels along the Strip. The sign of the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street talks. Its cowboy, 60 feet high, says "Howdy Pardner" every 30 seconds. The big sign at the Aladdin Hotel has spawned a little sign with similar proportions to mark the entrance to the parking. "But such signs!" says Tom Wolfe. "They soar in shapes before which the existing vocabulary of art history is helpless. I can only attempt to supply names—Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral, McDonald's Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptical, Miami Beach Kidney." $^{3}$ Buildings are also signs. At night on Fremont Street, whole buildings are illuminated but not through reflection from spotlights; they are made into sources of light by closely spaced neon tubes. Amid the diversity, the familiar Shell and Gulf signs stand out like friendly beacons in a foreign land. But in Las Vegas they reach three times higher into the air than at your local service station to meet the competition of the casinos.

§ INCLUSION AND THE DIFFICULT ORDER

Henri Bergson called disorder an order we cannot see. The emerging order of the Strip is a complex order. It is not the easy, rigid order of the urban renewal project or the fashionable "total design" of the megastructure. It is, on the contrary, a manifestation of an opposite direction in architectural theory: Broadacre City—a travesty of Broadacre City, perhaps, but a kind of vindication of Frank Lloyd Wright's predictions for the American landscape. The commercial strip within the urban sprawl is, of course, Broadacre City with a difference. Broadacre City's easy, motivaI order identified and unified its vast spaces and separate buildings at the scale of the omnipotent automobile. Each building, without doubt, was to be designed by the Master or by his Taliesin Fellowship, with no room for honky-tonk improvisations. An easy control would be exercised over similar elements within the universal, Usonian vocabulary to the exclusion, certainly, of commercial vulgarities. But the order of the Strip includes; it includes at all levels, from the mixture of seemingly incongruous land uses to the mixture of

You don't come to Caesars Palace to play solitaire…

51. Caesars Palace tourist brochure

52. Caesars Palace oasis

54. Caesars Palace

57-58. Caesars Palace signs and statuary

59. Caesars Palace sign

62. Aladdin signs

Concerning Strip Beautification

Not the image of the Champs Elysées

trees here views 9 signs gems windows are hard to meet lots of greenery and water noise humidity and city

Post things stop has are signs of aesthetic

Gas stations are all right their standing image people generally the unique aesthetic of the hotels (in fact the gas stations are the best in company for with the hotels)

Made smaller the New East; Tile Mosais Maximum effect with a minimum amount of water

• Extra-graphics

The medium of the strip shows he paved in gold

Recommended the forms of the polling lots

69. A message to the Strip Beautification Committee

CHARGED LISTINGS PLEASE NOTE 2020

Pop artists have shown the value of the old cliché used in a new context to achieve a new meaning—the soup can in the art gallery—to make the common uncommon. And in literature, Eliot and Joyce display, according to Poirier, “an extraordinary vulnerability … to the idioms, rhythms, artifacts, associated with certain urban environments or situations. The multitudinous styles of Ulysses are so dominated by them that there are only intermittent sounds of Joyce in the novel and no extended passage certifiably in his as distinguished from a mimicked style.” $^{5}$ Poirier refers to this as the “decreative impulse.” $^{6}$ Eliot himself speaks of Joyce’s doing the best he can “with the material at hand.” $^{7}$ Perhaps a fitting requiem for the irrelevant works of Art that are today’s descendants of a once meaningful Modern architecture are Eliot’s lines in “East Coker”: $^{8}$

These relationships, and combinations between signs and buildings, between architecture and symbolism, between form and meaning, between driver and the roadside are deeply relevant to architecture today and have been discussed at length by several writers. But they have not been studied in detail or as an overall system. The students of urban perception and “imageability” have ignored them, and there is some evidence that the Strip would confound their theories. How is it that in spite of “noise” from competing signs we do in fact find what we want on the Strip? Also, we have no good graphic tools for depicting the Strip as message giver. How can the visual importance of the Stardust sign be mapped at 1 inch to 100 feet?

THE ARCHITECTURE OF

PERSUASION

In The View From the Road, Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer describe the driving experience as "a sequence played to the eyes of a captive, somewhat fearful, but partially inattentive audience, whose vision is filtered and directed forward."

Movement perception along a road is within a structural order of constant elements—the road, sky, lamppost spacing, and yel-

1. Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View From the Road (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1964), p. 5. low stripes. A person can orient to this, while the rest just happens! Lynch found that more than half the objects sighted along a road by both drivers and passengers are seen straight ahead and narrowly to the sides, as if with blinders (Fig. 11). (That is why the sign must be big and must be along the road.) About one-third of the attention is off to the immediate sides. Attention is also more focused on "moving" objects than on "stable" ones, except when the observer passes a visual barrier and, in order to reorient, surveys a new landscape. Speed is the determinant of focal angle, both for driver and passengers. Increases of speed narrow the focal angle with a resulting visual shift from detail to generality; attention shifts to points of decision. The body sensations of speed are few in a car. We depend upon vision for our perception of speed. Objects that pass overhead greatly increase the sense of speed.

Does Las Vegas make any attempt to control speed—slow down, therefore see more detail, therefore buy? (Daniel Scully and Peter Schmitt)

§ VAST SPACE IN THE HISTORICAL TRADITION AND AT THE A&P

The Las Vegas Strip eludes our concepts of urban form and space, ancient or modern. It has as little to do with Haussmann as

are suitable for large, broad objects in space, like buildings, but not for thin, intense objects, like signs; planning techniques are able to depict activity (land use), but in excessively general categories, for the ground floor only, and without intensity.

We need techniques for abstracting, for example, to represent “twin phenomena” or to demonstrate concepts and generalized schema—an archetypal casino or a piece of the urban fabric—rather than specific buildings. The pretty photographs that we and other tourists made in Las Vegas are not enough.

How do you distort these to draw out a meaning for a designer? How do you differentiate on a plan between form that is to be specifically built as shown and that which is, within constraints, allowed to happen? How do you represent the Strip as perceived by Mr. A. rather than as a piece of geometry? How do you show quality of light—or qualities of form—in plan at 1 inch to 100 feet? How do you show fluxes and flows, or seasonal variation, or change with time?

LAS VEGAS AS A PATTERN OF ACTIVITIES

A city is a set of intertwined activities that form a pattern on the land. The Las Vegas Strip is not a chaotic sprawl but a set of activities whose pattern, as with other cities, depends on the technology of movement and communication and the economic value of land. We term it sprawl, because it is a new pattern we have not yet understood. The aim here is for us as designers to derive an understanding of this new pattern.

The questions are: How can the traditional city planning methods for depicting activity patterns (land-use and transportation maps) be adapted to a city such as Las Vegas? How can they be made useful as inspiration sources and design tools for urban designers? What other methods are there for coming to an understanding of the city as an activity system?

In search of answers, we shall experiment with different techniques for representing the following:

~ 1. Las Vegas and the Strip as phenomena in the space economy, national and local.

2. Land use and intensity of use for the region in general and the Strip in detail.

3. The linkages between activities on and around the Strip.

4. Movement and stopping systems for auto, transit, pedestrian, rail, and air for the region and for pedestrian, transit, and auto for the Strip.

5. Volume and flow of different types of traffic at different time periods.

6. The relation between activities and movement at different scales along the Strip.

7. The Strip as recreation system, a promenade.

ing type with buildings on the X axis and parts of buildings on the Y axis. Reading across we have one building; reading down one column, all elevations of that building type on the Strip; and on the diagonal, a prototypical building (Figs. 42, 43).

GASOLINE STATIONS (FIG. 47)

The client: The real estate department of the oil company. Handles site acquisition, construction and coordination, financing, and so forth.

The site: Determined by the traffic count, cost of land, and competition. Frontage generally determines cost—average 150 feet.

The building: Two or three service bays, facing the front; the office; storage space; customer services—“travel center,” vending machines, rest rooms, and so forth.

The styling: Pressures from the beautification people and local zoning boards; Mobil's "modern" box, Shell's "ranch house," and the universal "Colonial" (it's just like your suburban house, except it has pumps in front); use of residential materials—wood, brick, stone; a trend toward standardized form where the building becomes a sign.

The signs: Three orders of magnitude: one sign for great distances (freeway scale); one sign for approach distances (feeder road); the building or sign canopy for close-up.

The lighting: Says station is open; lighting crucial at entrance, exit, and pumps. Oil companies want the source of light visible for maximum impact, resist indirect lighting; big problems with bugs and with zoning boards.

The service area: Pumps and oil displays; canopy provides protection from the sun and bad weather and acts as a sign (Mobil's circle or Phillips' soaring V). Must be fully visible from the service bays in the station, because most stations are one- or two-man operations. There must be plenty of room to maneuver in order to prevent collisions with the pumps and equipment.

“For the average citizen there are some simple tests which will tell him when we have passed from incantation to practical action on the environment. Restriction of auto use in the large cities will be one. Another will be when the billboards, the worst and most nearly useless excrescence of industrial civilization, are removed from the highways…My own personal test, for what it may be worth, concerns the gasoline service station. This is the most repellent piece of architecture of the past two thousand years. There are far more of them than are needed. Usually they are filthy. Their merchandise is hideously packaged and garishly displayed. They are uncontrollably addicted to great strings of ragged little flags. Protecting them is an ominous coalition of small businessmen and large. The stations

ing at them; they're looking at everybody else." —Morris Lapidus $^{3}$

§ LAS VEGAS STYLES

Miami Moroccan, International Jet Set Style; Arte Moderne Hollywood Orgasmic, Organic Behind; Yamasaki Bernini cum Roman Orgiastic; Niemeyer Moorish; Moorish Tudor (Arabian Knights); Bauhaus Hawaiian.

“People are looking for illusions; they don’t want the world’s realities. And, I asked, where do I find this world of illusion? Where are their tastes formulated? Do they study it in school? Do they go to museums? Do they travel in Europe? Only one place—the movies. They go to the movies. The hell with everything else.” —Morris Lapidus $^{4}$

§ LAS VEGAS SIGNS (FIGS. 62-68)

The time has arrived for a scholar to write a doctoral dissertation on signs. He or she would need literary as well as artistic acumen, because the same reason that makes signs Pop Art (the need for high-speed communication with maximum meaning) makes them Pop literature as

3. Morris Lapidus, quoted in Progres-sive Architecture (September 1970), p. 122.

4. Ibid., p. 120.

well. For example, this one from Philadelphia:

O. R. LUMPKIN. BODYBUILDERS. FENDERS STRAIGHTENED. WRECKS OUR SPECIALTY. WE TAKE THE DENT OUT OF ACCI- DENT.

We shall be analyzing and categorizing the signs of Las Vegas by content and form, by function (night and day) and location, as well as by size, color, structure, and method of construction, trying to understand what makes the "Las Vegas style" in signs and what we can learn from them about an impure architecture of form and symbols.

A stylistic analysis of Las Vegas signs would trace the influence of the greats (the designers in YESCO) through to the minor architecture of wedding chapels and sauna baths, compare the national and general sign imagery of the gasoline stations with the unique and specific symbolic imagery of the casinos, and follow the influence patterns back and forth between artists and sign makers. It would trace parallels with historical architecture that emphasizes association and symbolism, such as Romanticism, eclecticism, Mannerism, and the iconographic aspects of Gothic architecture, and tie these into the sign styles of Las Vegas.

In the seventeenth century, Rubens created a painting “fac-tory” wherein different workers

ments to each other—are necessary to good design, whether it be a matter of clothing, art, architecture, or an electrical sign. Relative size, not over-all size, is the factor in determining guidelines which will satisfactorily influence attractive appearance.”

—California Electric Sign Association $^{7}$

Should a gas station on the Strip be required to blend with (that is, look like) the casinos?

How can a design intention be differentiated graphically from one possible design among many that might stem from a design control?

Computer-video urban simulation systems suggest possibilities for controls to be tried out through the simulation of environments. Imaginatively used, this could make for looser yet more efficient controls.

CONTROLS AND BEAUTIFICATION

The Las Vegas Strip “just grew,” and perhaps its initiators built it outside the city limits in order to escape controls. But today there are the usual building and zoning controls and a “Strip Beautification Committee” as well (Fig. 69). There is no good record of commissions on aesthetics producing good architecture. $^{8}$ (Haussmann was not a

7. “Guideline Standards for On Premise Signs,” prepared specifically for Community Planning Authorities by California Electric Sign Association, Los Angeles, Calif. (1967), p. 14.

8. See Appendix.

commission but a one-man control system. His power and its results are dubiously desirable and certainly unattainable today.) Commissions produce mediocrity and a deadened urb. What will happen to the Strip when the tastemakers take over?

SIGN CONTROL

The basic premises of three major parties are as follows:

Aesthetician: “Urban environment as medium of communication… Signs should enhance and clarify this communication.”

Sign Industry: “Signs are good, they’re good for business, that makes ‘um good for H’america too.”

Legal Statutes: “If you’ll just perform these minimal requirements we can collect a fee for the city and you gentlemen can continue your sender-message-receiver responses.” (Charles Korn)

§ IMAGE OF LAS VEGAS: INCLUSION AND ALLUSION IN ARCHITECTURE (FIGS. 71, 72)

An image employed by a designer should be something very evocative, something that does not limit by being too defined and too concrete, yet helps the designer think of the city in physical terms. Laughing or crying faces or people sitting at gambling machines are not enough. What is an urban designer's image, or set of images, for

73. "Long Island Duckling" from God's Own Junkyard

cial architecture of urban sprawl as our source for a civic and residential architecture of meaning, viable now, as the turn-of-the-century industrial vocabulary was viable for a Modern architecture of space and industrial technology 40 years ago. We shall show how the iconography, rather than the space and piazzas of historical architecture, forms the background for the study of association and symbolism in commercial art and strip architecture.

Finally we shall argue for the symbolism of the ugly and ordinary in architecture and for the particular significance of the decorated shed with a rhetorical front and conventional behind: for architecture as shelter with symbols on it.

THE DUCK AND THE DECORATED SHED

Let us elaborate on the decorated shed by comparing Paul Rudolph's Crawford Manor with our Guild House (in association with Cope and Lippincott; Figs. 77, 78). These two buildings are comparable in use, size, and date of construction: Both are high-rise apartments for the elderly, consisting of about 90 units, built in the mid-1960s. Their settings vary: Guild House, although freestanding, is a six-story imitation palazzo, analogous in structure and materials to the surrounding buildings and continuing, through its position and form, the street line of the Philadelphia gridiron plan it sits in. Crawford Manor, on the other hand, is unequivocally a soaring tower, unique in its Modern, Ville Radieuse world along New Haven's limited-access Oak Street Connector.

But it is the contrast in the images of these buildings in relation to their systems of construction that we want to emphasize. The system of construction and program of Guild House are ordinary and conventional and look it; the system of construction and program of Crawford Manor are ordinary and conventional but do not look it.

Let us interject here that we chose Crawford Manor for this comparison not because of any particular antagonism toward that building. It is, in fact, a skillful building by a skillful architect, and we could easily have chosen a much more extreme version of what we are criticizing. But in general we chose it because it can represent establishment architecture now (that is, it represents the great majority of what you see today in any architecture journal), and in particular because it corresponds in fundamental ways with Guild House. On the other hand, our choosing Guild House for comparison involves a disadvantage, because that building is now five years old, and some of our later work can more explicitly and vividly convey our current ideas. Last, please do not criticize us for primarily analyzing image: We are doing so simply because image is pertinent to our argument, not because we wish to deny an interest in or the importance of process, program, and struc

bolic. The continuous stripe of white-glazed brick high on the facade, in combination with the plane of white-glazed brick below, divides the building into three uneven stories: basement, principal story, and attic. It contradicts the scale of the six real and equal floors on which it is imposed and suggests the proportions of a Renaissance palace. The central white panel also enhances the focus and scale of the entrance. It extends the ground floor to the top of the balcony of the second floor in the way, and for the same reasons, that the increased elaboration and scale around the door of a Renaissance palace or Gothic portal does. The exceptional and fat column in an otherwise flat wall surface increases the focus of the entrance, and the luxurious granite and glazed brick enhance the amenity there, as does the veined marble that developers apply at street level to make their apartment entrances more classy and rentable. At the same time, the column's position in the middle of the entrance diminishes its importance.

The arched window in Guild House is not structural. Unlike the more purely ornamental elements in this building, it reflects an interior function of the shed, that is, the common activities at the top. But the big common room itself is an exception to the system inside. On the front elevation, an arch sits above a central vertical stripe of balcony voids, whose base is the ornamental entrance. Arch, balconies, and base together unify the facade and, like a giant order (or classic jukebox front), undermine the six stories to increase the scale and monumentality of the front. In turn, the giant order is topped by a flourish, an unconnected, symmetrical television antenna in gold anodized aluminum, which is both an imitation of an abstract Lippold sculpture and symbol for the elderly. An open-armed, polychromatic, plaster madonna in this position would have been more inageful but unsuitable for a Quaker institution that eschews all outward symbols—as do Crawford Manor and most orthodox Modern architecture, which reject ornament and association in the perception of forms.

EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT ASSOCIATIONS

Adornments of representational sculpture on the roof, or a prettily shaped window, or wittiness or rhetoric of any kind are unthinkable for Crawford Manor. Nor would it sport appliqués of expensive material on a column or white stripes and wainscoting copied from Renaissance compositions. For instance, Crawford Manor's cantilevered balconies are "structurally integrated"; they are paraped with the overall structural material and devoid of ornament. Balconies at Guild House are not structural exercises, and the railings are adornments as well as recollections at a bigger scale of conventional patterns in stamped metal (Fig. 84).

77. Crawford Manor, New Haven, 1962-1966; Paul Rudolph

79. Crawford Manor, typical plan

81. Crawford Manor (detail)

83. Guild House, central panel

case the heroic and original facade is somewhat ironical, but it is this juxtaposition of contrasting symbols—the appliqué of one order of symbols on another—that constitutes for us the decorated shed. This is what makes Guild House an architect's decorated shed—not architecture without architects.

The purest decorated shed would be some form of conventional systems-building shelter that corresponds closely to the space, structure, and program requirements of the architecture, and upon which is laid a contrasting—and, if in the nature of the circumstances, contradictory—decoration. In Guild House the ornamental-symbolic elements are more or less literally appliqué: The planes and stripes of white brick are appliqué; the street facade through its disengagement at the top corners implies its separation from the bulk of the shed at the front. (This quality also implies continuity, and therefore unity, with the street line of facades of the other older, nonfreestanding buildings on each side.) The symbolism of the decoration happens to be ugly and ordinary with a dash of ironic heroic and original, and the shed is straight ugly and ordinary, though in its brick and windows it is symbolic too. Although there is ample historical precedent for the decorated shed, present-day roadside commercial architecture—the $10,000 stand with the $100,000 sign—was the immediate prototype of our decorated shed. And it is in the sign of Guild House that the purest manifestation of the decorated shed and the most vivid contrast with Crawford Manor lies.

ORNAMENT: SIGNS AND SYMBOLS, DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION, HERALDRY AND PHYSIOGNOMY, MEANING AND EXPRESSION

A sign on a building carries a denotative meaning in the explicit message of its letters and words. It contrasts with the connotative expression of the other, more architectural elements of the building. A big sign, like that over the entrance of Guild House, big enough to be read from passing cars on Spring Garden Street, is particularly ugly and ordinary in its explicit commercial associations (Fig. 86). It is significant that the sign for Crawford Manor is modest, tasteful, and not commercial. It is too small to be seen from fast-moving cars on the Oak Street Connector. But signs as explicit symbols, especially big, commercial-looking signs, are anathema in architecture such as Crawford Manor. Its identification comes, not through explicit, denotative communication, through literally spelling out "I am Guild House," but through the connotation implicit in the physiognomy of its pure architectural form, which is intended to express in some way housing for the elderly.

We have borrowed the simple literary distinctions between “denotative” and “connotative” meanings and applied them to the heraldic and

Table 1. Comparison of Guild House and Crawford Manor

HISTORICAL AND OTHER

PRECEDENTS: TOWARDS AN OLD ARCHITECTURE

HISTORICAL SYMBOLISM AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE

The forms of Modern architecture have been created by architects and analyzed by critics largely in terms of their perceptual qualities and at the expense of their symbolic meanings derived from association. To the extent that the Moderns recognize the systems of symbols that pervade our environment, they tend to refer to the debasement of our symbols. Although largely forgotten by Modern architects, the historical precedent for symbolism in architecture exists, and the complexities of iconography have continued to be a major part of the discipline of art history. Early Modern architects scorned recollection in architecture. They rejected eclecticism and style as elements of architecture as well as any historicism that minimized the revolutionary over the evolutionary character of their almost exclusively technology-based architecture. A second generation of Modern architects acknowledged only the "constituent facts" of history, as extracted by Sigfried Giedion, $^{2}$ who abstracted the historical building and its piazza as pure form and space in light. These architects' preoccupation with space as the architectural quality caused them to read the buildings as forms, the piazzas as space, and the graphics and sculpture as color, texture, and scale. The ensemble became an abstract expression in architecture in the decade of abstract expressionism in painting. The iconographic forms and trappings of medieval and Renaissance architecture were reduced to polychromatic texture at the service of space; the symbolic complexities and contradictions of Mannerist architecture were appreciated for their formal complexities and contradictions; Neoclassical architecture was liked, not for its Romantic use of association, but for its formal simplicity. Architects liked the backs of nineteenth century railroad stations—literally the sheds—and tolerated the fronts as irrelevant, if amusing, aberrations of historical eclecticism. The symbol systems developed by the commercial artists of Madison Avenue, which constitute the symbolic ambience of urban sprawl, they did not acknowledge.

In the 1950s and 1960s, these “Abstract Expressionists” of Modern architecture acknowledged one dimension of the hill town-piazza complex: its “pedestrian scale” and the “urban life” engendered by its architecture. This view of medieval urbanism encouraged the megastructural (or megasculptural?) fantasies—in this context hill towns with technological trimmings—and reinforced the antiautomobile bias of the Modern architect. But the competition of signs and symbols in the

messages, connotation as practiced by Modern architects is scarcely important. The shape of the facade, in fact, disguises the silhouette of nave and aisles behind, and the doors and the rose windows are the barest reflections of the architectural complex inside.

SYMBOLIC EVOLUTION IN LAS VEGAS

Just as the architectural evolution of a typical Gothic cathedral may be traced over the decades through stylistic and symbolic changes, a similar evolution—rare in contemporary architecture—may also be followed in the commercial architecture of Las Vegas. However, in Las Vegas, this evolution is compressed into years rather than decades, reflecting the quicker tempo of our times, if not the less eternal message of commercial rather than religious propaganda. Evolution in Las Vegas is consistently toward more and bigger symbolism. The Golden Nugget casino on Fremont Street was an orthodox decorated shed with big signs in the 1950s—essentially Main Street commercial, ugly and ordinary (Fig. 89). However, by the 1960s it was all sign; there was hardly any building visible (Fig. 90). The quality of the “electrographics” was made more strident to match the crasser scale and more distracting context of the new decade and to keep up with the competition next door. The freestanding signs on the Strip, like the towers at San Gimignano, get bigger as well. They grow either through sequential replacements, as at the Flamingo, the Desert Inn, and the Tropicana, or through enlargement as with the Caesars Palace sign, where a freestanding, pedimented temple facade was extended laterally by one column with a statue on top—a feat never attempted, a problem never solved in the whole evolution of Classical architecture (Fig. 91).

THE RENAISSANCE AND THE DECORATED SHED

The iconography of Renaissance architecture is less overtly propagandistic than is that of medieval or Strip architecture, although its ornament, literally based on the Roman, Classical vocabulary, was to be an instrument for the rebirth of classical civilization. However, since most of this ornament depicts structure—it is ornament symbolic of structure—it is less independent of the shed it is attached to than ornament on medieval and Strip architecture (Fig. 92). The image of the structure and space reinforces rather than contradicts the substance of the structure and space. Pilasters represent modular sinews on the surface of the wall; quoins represent reinforcement at the ends of the wall; vertical moldings, protection at the edges of the wall; rustication, support at the bottom of the wall; drip cornices, protection from rain on the wall; horizontal moldings, the progressive stages in the depth of the wall; and a combination of many of these ornaments at the edge of a

87. Metropole Cathedral, Athens

88. Amiens Cathedral, west front

91. Caesars Palace, extended sign

95. Carson Pirie Scott department store, Chicago

96. Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge and Restaurant, Charlottesville, Virginia

—Henri IV Renaissance in France, Tudor in England, for example. But quite consistently styles correspond to building types. 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 to make symbols of "embattled learning," as George Howe put it, "tending the torch of humanism through the dark ages of economic determinism," $^{3}$ and a choice between Perpendicular and Decorated for midcentury English churches reflected theological differences between the Oxford and Cambridge Movements. The hamburger-shaped hamburger stand is a current, more literal, attempt to express function via association but for commercial persuasion rather than theological refinement (Figs. 97-99).

Donald Drew Egbert, $^{4}$ in an analysis of midcentury submissions for the Prix de Rome at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts—home of the bad guys—called functionalism via association a symbolic manifestation of functionalism that preceded the substantive functionalism that was a basis for the Modern movement: Image preceded substance. Egbert also discussed the balance in the new nineteenth-century building types between expression of function via physiognomy and expression of function via style. For instance, the railroad station was recognizable by its cast-iron shed and big clock. These physiognomic symbols contrasted with the explicit heraldic signing of the Renaissance-eclectic waiting and station spaces up front. Sigfried Giedion called this artful contrast within the same building a gross contradiction—a nineteenth-century "split in feeling"—because he saw architecture as technology and space, excluding the element of symbolic meaning.

MODERN ORNAMENT

Modern architects began to make the back the front, symbolizing the configurations of the shed to-create a vocabulary for their architecture but denying in theory what they were doing in practice. They said one thing and did another. Less may have been more, but the I-section on Mies van der Rohe's fire-resistant columns, for instance, is as complexly ornamental as the applied plaster on the Renaissance pier or the incised shaft in the Gothic pier. (In fact, less was more work.) Acknowledged or not, Modern ornament has seldom been symbolic of anything non-architectural since the Bauhaus vanquished Art Deco and the decorative arts. More specifically, its content is consistently spatial and technological. Like the Renaissance vocabulary of the Classical orders, Mies's

tinction between wall and vault ambiguous, because these elements, traditionally identified with walls, extend over the vault's surface (Fig. 101).

In the chapel of the Byzantine Martorama in Sicily there is no question of architectural clarification or of Mannerist ambiguity (Fig. 102). Instead, representation smothers space, its patterns camouflaging the forms it adorns. The ornamental patterns are almost independent of, and at times contradictory to, walls, piers, soffits, vaults, and dome. These forms are rounded at their edges to accommodate continuous mosaic surfaces, and the gold mosaic background further softens the geometry, while in the obscure light that occasionally highlights significant symbols, space disintegrates into an amorphous glow. The gilded rocaille in the Amalienburg pavilion at Nymphenburg does the same thing with bas-relief (Fig. 103). Motival bas-relief, splattered like spinach over walls and furniture, hardware and sconces; reflected by mirrors and crystal fixtures; enhanced by generous light yet obscured by indeterminate curves in plan and section, disintegrates space into an amorphous glitter. Significantly, the Rococo ornament is hardly symbolic and not at all propagandistic. It obscures space, but the ornament is still architectural; in the Byzantine church, propagandistic symbolism overwhelms architecture.

THE LAS VEGAS STRIP

The Las Vegas Strip at night, like the Martorama interior, is symbolic images in dark, amorphous space; but, like the Amalienburg, it glitters rather than glows (Fig. 104). Any sense of enclosure or direction comes from lighted signs rather than forms reflected in light (Fig. 105). The source of light in the Strip is direct; the signs themselves are the source. They do not reflect light from external, sometimes hidden, sources as is the case with most billboards and Modern architecture. The mechanical movement of neon lights is quicker than mosaic glitter, which depends on the passage of the sun and the pace of the observer; and the intensity of light on the Strip as well as the tempo of its movement is greater to accommodate the greater spaces, greater speeds, and greater impacts that our technology permits and our sensibilities respond to. Also, the tempo of our economy encourages that changeable and disposable environmental decoration known as advertising art. The messages are different now, but despite the differences the methods are the same, and architecture is no longer simply the “skillful, accurate, and magnificent play of masses seen in light.”

The Strip by day is a different place, no longer Byzantine (Fig. 106). The forms of the buildings are visible but remain secondary to the signs in visual impact and symbolic content. The space of urban sprawl is not

Table 2. Comparison of Urban Sprawl with Megastructure

100. House with Three Courts; perspective of bedroom wing; Mies van der Rohe

101. Casino Pio V, Rome

102. Martorama, Palermo

105. Las Vegas Strip at night

106. Las Vegas Strip by day

111. Las Vegas Strip

112. Town center, Cumbernauld, Scotland; Cumbernauld Development Corporation

this point by quoting from Claude Lévi-Strauss's description of kinship systems: $^{9}$

“Certainly the biological family is present and persists in human society. But what gives to kinship its character as a social fact is not what it must conserve of nature; it is the essential step by which it separates itself from nature. A system of kinship does not consist of objective blood ties; it exists only in the consciousness of men; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a situation of fact.”

Colquhoun claims that there is a

“parallel between such systems and the way modern man still approaches the world. And what was true of primitive man in all the ramifications of his practical and emotional life—namely the need to represent the phenomenal world in such a way that it becomes a coherent and logical system—persists in our own organizations, and more particularly in our attitude toward the man-made objects of our environment.” $^{10}$

The perceptual-psychological necessity for representation in art and architecture in Colquhoun's argument is based on E. H. Gombrich's book Meditations on a Hobby Horse. Gombrich rejects the belief born of Modern Expressionist theory that "shapes have physiognomic or expressive content which communicates itself to us directly." He demonstrates, Colquhoun says, that

“the arrangement of forms such as found in a painting by Kandinsky is in fact very low in content, unless we attribute to these forms some system of conventional meanings not inherent in the forms themselves. His thesis is that physiognomic forms are ambiguous, though not wholly without expressive value, and that they can only be interpreted within a particular cultural ambience.” $^{12}$

Gombrich illustrates this by reference to the supposed inherent affective qualities of color exemplified in traffic signals; and Colquhoun cites the recent adoption by the Chinese of the color red for go, indicating action and forward movement, and of green for stop, indicating inaction and caution—this easy reversal itself indicating the triumph of con-

THEORY OF UGLY AND ORDINARY AND RELATED AND CONTRARY THEORIES

ORIGINS AND FURTHER DEFINITION OF UGLY AND ORDINARY

Let us describe our own experience as architects to explain how we came to ugly and ordinary architecture. After the appearance of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, $^{5}$ we began to realize that few of our firm's buildings were complex and contradictory, at least not in their purely architectural qualities of space and structure as opposed to their symbolic content. We had failed to fit into our buildings double-functioning or vestigial elements, circumstantial distortions, expedient devices, eventful exceptions, exceptional diagonals, things in things, crowded or contained intricacies, linings or layerings, residual spaces, redundant spaces, ambiguities, inflections, dualities, difficult wholes, or the phenomena of both-and. There was little in our work of inclusion, inconsistency, compromise, accommodation, adaptation, superadjacency, equivalence, multiple focus, juxtaposition, or good and bad space.

Most of the complexities and contradictions we relished thinking about we did not use, because we did not have the opportunity. Venturi and Rauch did not get big commissions whose programs and settings justified complex and contradictory forms, and as artists we could not impose on our work inapplicable ideas that we liked as critics. A building should not be a vehicle for an architect's ideas, etc. Also our budgets were low, and we did not want to design a building twice—once to fit some heroic idea of its importance to society and the world of art and, after the bids came in, a second time to reflect the client's and society's restricted idea of our architecture's value. Whether society was right or wrong was not for us at that moment to argue. Therefore our Brighton Beach Housing entry did not turn out a megastructure for living in or our Fire Station in Columbus, Indiana, a personalized essay in civic monumentality for a pedestrian pizza by the side of the highway. They turned out "ugly and ordinary," as two such divergent critics as Philip Johnson and Gordon Bunshaft have described our work. "Ugly" or "beautiful" is perhaps a question of semantics in this context, but these two architects did catch the spirit, in a way.

Architecture may be ordinary→or rather, conventional—in two ways: in how it is constructed or in how it is seen, that is, in its process or in its symbolism. To construct conventionally is to use ordinary materials and engineering, accepting the present and usual organization of the

tures, and colors, carefully composed (Fig. 115). The total image of our U&O fire house—an image implying civic character as well as specific use—comes from the conventions of roadside architecture that it follows; from the decorated false facade, from the banality through familiarity of the standard aluminum sash and roll-up doors, and from the flagpole in front—not to mention the conspicuous sign that identifies it through spelling, the most denotative of symbols: FIRE STATION NO. 4 (Fig. 116). These elements act as symbols as well as expressive architectural abstractions. They are not merely ordinary but represent ordinariness symbolically and stylistically; they are enriching as well, because they add a layer of literary meaning.

Richness can come from conventional architecture. For 300 years European architecture was variations on a Classical norm—a rich conformity. But it can also come through an adjusting of the scale or context of familiar and conventional elements to produce unusual meanings. Pop artists used unusual juxtapositions of everyday objects in tense and vivid plays between old and new associations to flout the everyday interdependence of context and meaning, giving us a new interpretation of twentieth-century cultural artifacts. The familiar that is a little off has a strange and revealing power.

The double-hung window in Guild House is familiar in form but unusually large in size and horizontal in proportion, like the big, distorted Campbell Soup can in Andy Warhol's painting. This typical window is also juxtaposed with a smaller window of the same form and proportion. The exact location of the bigger window on a parallel plane behind the smaller window tends to disturb the habitual perception of distance through perspective; the resultant symbolic and optical tensions are, we maintain, a means of making boring architecture interesting—a more valid means than the irrelevant articulations of today's strident but boring minimegastructures (Fig. 117).

AGAINST DUCKS, OR UGLY AND ORDINARY OVER HEROIC AND ORIGINAL, OR THINK LITTLE

We should not emphasize the ironic richness of banality in today's artistic context at the expense of discussing the appropriateness and inevitability of U&O architecture on a wider basis. Why do we uphold the symbolism of the ordinary via the decorated shed over the symbolism of the heroic via the sculptural duck? Because this is not the time and ours is not the environment for heroic communication through pure architecture. Each medium has its day, and the rhetorical environmental statements of our time—civic, commercial, or residential—will come from media more purely symbolic, perhaps less static and more adapt-

this point by quoting from Claude Lévi-Strauss's description of kinship systems: $^{9}$

“Certainly the biological family is present and persists in human society. But what gives to kinship its character as a social fact is not what it must conserve of nature; it is the essential step by which it separates itself from nature. A system of kinship does not consist of objective blood ties; it exists only in the consciousness of men; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a situation of fact.”

Colquhoun claims that there is a

“parallel between such systems and the way modern man still approaches the world. And what was true of primitive man in all the ramifications of his practical and emotional life—namely the need to represent the phenomenal world in such a way that it becomes a coherent and logical system—persists in our own organizations, and more particularly in our attitude toward the man-made objects of our environment.” $^{10}$

The perceptual-psychological necessity for representation in art and architecture in Colquhoun's argument is based on E. H. Gombrich's book Meditations on a Hobby Horse. Gombrich rejects the belief born of Modern Expressionist theory that "shapes have physiognomic or expressive content which communicates itself to us directly." He demonstrates, Colquhoun says, that

“the arrangement of forms such as found in a painting by Kandinsky is in fact very low in content, unless we attribute to these forms some system of conventional meanings not inherent in the forms themselves. His thesis is that physiognomic forms are ambiguous, though not wholly without expressive value, and that they can only be interpreted within a particular cultural ambience.” $^{12}$

Gombrich illustrates this by reference to the supposed inherent affective qualities of color exemplified in traffic signals; and Colquhoun cites the recent adoption by the Chinese of the color red for go, indicating action and forward movement, and of green for stop, indicating inaction and caution—this easy reversal itself indicating the triumph of con-

Modern movement. Through excluding a body of traditional practice for the sake of “science,” a vacuum was left that was filled ironically by a form of permissive expressionism: “What appears on the surface as a hard, rational discipline of design, turns out rather paradoxically to be a mystical belief in the intuitive process.” $^{15}$

FIRMNESS + COMMODITY ≠ DELIGHT: MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND THE INDUSTRIAL VERNACULAR

Vitruvius wrote, via Sir Henry Wootton, that architecture was Firmness and Commodity and Delight. Gropius (or perhaps only his followers) implied, via the bio-technical determinism just described, that Firmness and Commodity equal Delight; that structure plus program rather simply result in form; that beauty is a by-product; and that—to tamper with the equation in another way—the process of making architecture becomes the image of architecture. Louis Kahn in the 1950s said that the architect should be surprised by the appearance of his design (Fig. 118).

Presumed in these equations is that process and image are never contradictory and that Delight is a result of the clarity and harmony of these simple relationships, untinged, of course, by the beauty of symbolism and ornament or by the associations of preconceived form: Architecture is frozen process.

The historians of the Modern movement concentrated on the innovative engineering structures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as prototypes for Modern architecture, but it is significant that the bridges of Maillart are not architecture, and the hangars of Freysin-net are hardly architecture. As engineering solutions, their programs are simple and without the inherent contradictions of architectural programs. To traverse a ravine directly, safely, and cheaply or to protect a big space from the rain without intervening supports is all that is required of these structures. The unavoidable symbolic content of even such simple, utilitarian constructions and the unavoidable use of what Colquhoun calls typologies were ignored by the theorists of the Modern movement. The not infrequent ornamentation of these forms was excused as a deviant architectural hangover, characteristic of the times. But the ornamentation of utilitarian superstructures is typical of all times. The defensive walls of the medieval city were topped with elaborately varied crenellations and studded with rhetorically ornamented gates. The applied decorations of the classic structures of the Industrial Revolution (we see them as more classic than innovative) are another manifestation of the decorated shed—for example, the elaborated gusset plates of the frame bridges, or the modified Corinthian capitals of the fluted cast-iron columns in loft buildings, or the eclectically stylish en-15. Ibid.

tectural iconography based on their interpretation of the progressive technology of the Industrial Revolution (Fig. 121).

Colquhoun refers to the “iconic power” attributed by “those in the field of design who were—and are—preaching pure technology and so-called objective design method … to the creations of technology, which they worship to a degree inconceivable in a scientist.” $^{16}$ He also writes of “the power of all artifacts to become icons … whether or not they were specifically created for this purpose,” and he cites nineteenth-century steamships and locomotives as examples of objects “made ostensibly with utilitarian purposes in mind” which “quickly become gestalt entities … imbued with aesthetic unity” and symbolic quality. These objects, along with the factories and grain elevators, became explicit typological models that, despite what architects said to the contrary, significantly influenced the method of Modern architectural design and served as sources for its symbolic meanings.

INDUSTRIAL STYLING AND THE CUBIST MODEL

Later critics referred to a “machine aesthetic,” and others have accepted the term, but Le Corbusier among the Modern masters was unique in elaborately describing industrial prototypes for his architecture in Vers une Architecture (Fig. 122). However, even he claimed the steamship and the grain elevator for their forms rather than their associations, for their simple geometry rather than their industrial image. It is significant, on the other hand, that the buildings of Le Corbusier, illustrated in his book, physically resemble the steamships and the grain elevators but not the Parthenon or the furniture in Santa Maria in Cosmedin or Michelangelo’s details for Saint Peter’s, which are also illustrated for their simple geometric forms. The industrial prototypes became literal models for Modern architecture, while the historical-architectural prototypes were merely analogs selected for certain of their characteristics. To put it another way, the industrial buildings were symbolically correct; the historical buildings were not.

For the abstract geometrical formalism of Le Corbusier's architecture at this time, Cubism was the model. It was the second model, in part countering that of the nautical-industrial images, and it accounted for the hovering, stuccoed planes that enveloped the industrial sash and spiral stairs in the Villa Savoye. Although historians describe the relation between painting and architecture of this period as a harmonious diffusion of the Zeitgeist, it was more an adaptation of the language of painting to that of architecture. The systems of pure, simple forms, sometimes transparent, that penetrate flowing space were explicitly

following models serve as sources for symbolic representation in our best buildings today: Cape Kennedy launching pads (Fig. 123); the industrial vernacular of the English Midlands (Fig. 124); Victorian greenhouses (Fig. 125); Futurist zoots (Fig. 126); Constructivist proteomagstructures (Fig. 127); space frames (Fig. 128); Piranesian carceri (Fig. 129); plastic forms indigenous to the Mediterranean (Fig. 130); pedestrian scale, medieval-space Tuscan hill towns (Fig. 131); and the works of the form givers of the Heroic period (Fig. 132).

FROM LA TOURETTE TO NEIMAN-MARCUS

The stylistic evolution from La Tourette to Neiman-Marcus is a characteristic development of form-giver symbolism in late Modern architecture. Le Corbusier's tense manifestation of late genius, a monastery in a Burgundian field (Fig. 133), is itself a brilliant adaptation of a white plastic vernacular of the eastern Mediterranean. Its forms became an Art and Architecture Building on a street corner in New Haven (Fig. 134), a brick laboratory on the campus at Cornell (Fig. 135), and a palazzo pubblico in a piazza in Boston (Fig. 136). A latest version of this Burgundian cloister is a department store off the Westheimer strip in suburban Houston—a pure symbol of progressive gentility set in a sea of parking (Figs. 137, 138). Again, we do not criticize these replications of a classic masterpiece in a different place for a different use, although we suggest the replication would have been done better if it had been accepted philosophically and used wittily, as in the case of a Beaux-Arts department store designed after an Italian palazzo. This series of buildings from Burgundy to Texas illustrates the Modern architect's tendency to glorify originality through copying it.

SLAVISH FORMALISM AND ARTICULATED EXPRESSIONISM

Substituting nonfunctioning imitations of a deterministic process for preconceived form has resulted not only in confusion and irony but in a formalism that is the more slavish for being unadmitted. Those planners and architects who decry formalism in architecture are frequently rigid and arbitrary when the time comes for committing their projects to form. Urban designers, having learned the antiformalist pieties of the architectural profession and the critique of "physical bias" of the planning profession, are often caught in this dilemma. Once the "planning process" has been planned and the "guidelines for development" have been set, plans are filled in with hypothetical buildings to show "possible developments" using the fashionable shapes of the architectural leader fancied by the recent graduate who happens to be "on the design side" of the project in the office at that time, whether or not this

115. Central Fire Station, New Haven, 1959-1962; Earl P. Carlin, Architect; Paul E. Pozzi, Peter Millard, Associates

116. Fire Station No. 4, Columbus, Indiana, 1965-1967; Venturi and Rauch

119. Plant for Lady Esther, Ltd., Clearing, Illinois; Albert Kahn

120. Plant for Lady Esther, Ltd.

123. Cape Kennedy

124. St. Stephen's Maltings, Canterbury

125. Palm House, Kew

126. Project for a Subway, 1914; Anto Sant'Elia

127. Russian Constructivist sketch for industrial building from Tchernikov's 101 Fantasies

133. Monastery of La Tourette, Evreux, France, 1956-1960; Le Corbusier

134. Yale University Art and Architecture Building, New Haven, 1962-1963; Paul Rudolph

135. Cornell University Agronomy Building, Ithaca, New York, 1963-1968; Ulrich Franzen

day's details are too sensitive for the timbre of our environment. However, at the opposite extreme, there is an individual need for intimacy and detail, unmet by Modern design but satisfied by the five-eighths scale reproductions in Disneyland, by the caricatures of human scale in the patios of garden apartments, and by the seven-eighths scale furnishings of the fancy interiors of Levittown model homes.

SPACE AS GOD

Perhaps the most tyrannical element in our architecture now is space. Space has been contrived by architects and defied by critics, filling the vacuum created by fugitive symbolism. If articulation has taken over from ornament in the architecture of abstract expressionism, space is what displaced symbolism. Our heroic and original symbols, from carceri to Cape Kennedy, feed our late Romantic egos and satisfy our lust for expressionistic, acrobatic space for a new age in architecture. It's space and light—light as an element for distorting space for further dramatization. The spatial replication today of the mills of the nineteenth-century industrial Midlands illustrates the irrelevance of these borrowings. The complex diagonal clerestories and sheer glass walls and roofs of early industrial architecture responded to the need for natural light and the availability of minimum artificial light for a 12-hour working day in a latitude where winter days are short and winters are long. On the other hand, the Manchester mill owner could depend on a cool climate in the summer, low heating standards in the winter and cheap and docile labor to put up with the conditions and repair the leaks. Today, however, most buildings need windows to look out of rather than glass walls for light, because our lighting standards are higher than can be satisfied through daylight alone, and areas of glass must be kept small and ceilings reasonably low to contain the air conditioning and meet the budget. Therefore our aesthetic impact should come from sources other than light, more symbolic and less spatial sources.

MEGASTRUCTURES AND DESIGN CONTROL

Recent Modern architecture has achieved formalism while rejecting form, promoted expressionism while ignoring ornament, and defied space while rejecting symbols. Confusions and ironies result from this unpleasantly complex and contradictory situation. Ironically we glorify originality through replication of the forms of Modern masters. There is little harm in this symbolic individualism except for its effect on the budget, but there is harm in imposing on the whole landscape heroic representations of the masters' unique creations. Such symbolic heroism lies behind the Modern proclivity for the megastructure and for

mediocrity by rejecting the “good” and the “bad” and the new they do not recognize, all of which, in combination and in the end, make the city. (See Appendix.)

MISPLACED TECHNOLOGICAL ZEAL

The old revolutionaries of the fine arts commissions and the new revolutionaries of the megastructures are, in our opinion, equally irrelevant, both socially and artistically. They also share the same tradition in architectural technology, taking the progressive, revolutionary, machine-aesthetic stance of the early Modern architects; part of being "heroic and original" is being advanced technologically. The discrepancies between substance and image in Modern architecture's technological machismo and the costliness of its frequently empty gestures emerged earlier than architects would admit. Methods of industrial production turned out to be largely inapplicable to the construction of buildings. Many elegant structural systems (space frames, for instance), although they were highly efficient in relating stress to material and economical for spanning large industrial structures, failed decisively to work within the program, space, and budget of the more prosaic and usual architectural commissions. As Philip Johnson said, you can't put a door in a geodesic dome.

Furthermore, many architects who concentrated on engineering forms ignored other aspects of the building industry, for example, financing, distribution, existing trades, and conventional materials and methods. These important facets, as the developers have known, are highly subject to the improving effects of technology, including managerial technology, and affect the final form and cost of architecture substantially more than does innovative constructional technology. Architects have contributed little to the crucial building needs of this country—especially in housing—partly because their predilections for advanced technology of the symbolic and visionary kind have impeded their effectiveness within the going systems of construction.

While focusing on their favorite form of technological voodooism over the last 40 years (that is, researching industrialized methods of prefabrication), architects have until recently ignored the mobile home industry. This industry, without the architects' help and using a traditional technology—essentially carpentry, which is then related to innovative methods of distribution—is now producing one-fifth of the annual output of housing in America. Architects should forget about being great technical innovators in housing construction and concentrate on adapting this new and useful technology to more broadly defined needs than it serves today and on developing a vivid mobile home symbolism for mass markets (Fig. 140).

architects and theorists with vernacular, indigenous, or anonymous architecture. The simple, planar geometry of white Mediterranean forms appealed to the Cubist-Purist aesthetic of the young Le Corbusier, and their bold, rude plasticity was transformed into the béton brut of his late work. Then béton brut became a style—the style after the post-Miesian reaction against frame and panel architecture, with a vocabulary of forms, not to mention an explicit system of proportions, the Modulor, as precise as those of the Renaissance orders.

Architects who have adapted the forms of La Tourette for heroic symbolic purposes far removed from their original meaning, in using them in precast units, brick and baked enamel, from the industrial parks of New Jersey to the architectural monuments of Tokyo, have also harked back to the Mediterranean handcraft vernacular that inspired La Tourette. Vernacular models are popular where advanced technology is, even for Modern architects, farfetched, that is, for individual houses in the suburbs. The acceptance of primitive vernacular architecture has let in traditional architecture by the back door in the name of “regionalism.” Today even traditional American shed roofs and boards-and-battens are accepted and replace the flat roofs and imitation concrete that architects strove for and clients resisted in suburbia.

What architects now call anonymous architecture comes close to what we are calling Ordinary architecture, but it is not the same because it eschews symbolism and style. While architects have adapted the simple forms of vernacular architecture, they have largely ignored the complex symbolism behind them. They themselves have used the vernacular vocabularies symbolically, to suggest association with the past and simple, deterministic virtue, that is, as early examples of a correspondence between structural methods, social organization, and environmental influences, paralleling at a primitive level the benign processes that shape the industrial vernacular. Yet, ironically, architects—except for Aldo van Eyck in Africa and Gunther Nitschke in Japan—have discounted the symbolic values that invest these forms and dominate, so anthropologists tell us, the artifactual environment of primitive cultures, often contradicting function and structure in their influence on form.

FROM LA TOURETTE TO LEVITTOWN

It is a further irony that Modern architects, who can embrace vernacular architecture remote in place or time, can contemptuously reject the current vernacular of the United States, that is, the merchant builders' vernacular of Levittown and the commercial vernacular of Route 66. This aversion to the conventional building around us could be an exotic survival of nineteenth-century Romanticism, but we think it is merely that architects are able to discern the symbolism in the forms of their

pant of an anonymous vernacular tenement on an Italian medieval street could achieve identity through decoration on a front door—or perhaps through the bella figura of clothing—within the scale of a spatially limited, foot-going community. The same held for families behind the unified facades of Nash's London terraces. But for the middle-class suburbanite living, not in an antebellum mansion, but in a smaller version lost in a large space, identity must come through symbolic treatment of the form of the house, either through styling provided by the developer (for instance, split-level Colonial) or through a variety of symbolic ornaments applied thereafter by the owner (the Rococo lamp in the picture window or the wagon wheel out front, Fig. 144).

The critics of suburban iconography attribute its infinite combinations of standard ornamental elements to clutter rather than variety. This can be dismissed by suburbia's connoisseurs as the insensitivity of the uninitiate. To call these artifacts of our culture crude is to be mistaken concerning scale. It is like condemning theater sets for being crude at five feet or condemning plaster putti, made to be seen high above a Baroque cornice, for lacking the refinements of a Mino da Fiesole bas-relief on a Renaissance tomb. Also, the boldness of the suburban doodads distracts the eye from the telephone poles that even the silent majority does not like.

SILENT-WHITE-MAJORITY ARCHITECTURE

Many people like suburbia. This is the compelling reason for learning from Levittown. The ultimate irony is that although Modern architecture from the start has claimed a strong social basis for its philosophy, Modern architects have worked to keep formal and social concerns separate rather than together. In dismissing Levittown, Modern architects, who have characteristically promoted the role of the social sciences in architecture, reject whole sets of dominant social patterns because they do not like the architectural consequences of these patterns. Conversely, by defining Levittown as "silent-white-majority" architecture, they reject it again because they do not like what they believe to be the silent white majority's political views. These architects reject the very heterogeneity of our society that makes the social sciences relevant to architecture in the first place. As Experts with Ideals, who pay lip service to the social sciences, they build for Man rather than for people—this means, to suit themselves, that is, to suit their own particular upper-middle-class values, which they assign to everyone. Most suburbanites reject the limited formal vocabularies architects' values promote, or accept them 20 years later modified by the tract builder: The Usonian house becomes the ranch house. Only the very poor, via public

139. Recommendation for a monument

144. Developer's house with applied symbols

145. Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas

146. Minimegastructures are mostly ducks.

duce that content. If the commercial persuasions that flash on the strip are materialistic manipulation and vapid subcommunication, $^{21}$ which cleverly appeal to our deeper drives but send them only superficial messages, it does not follow that we architects who learn from their techniques must reproduce the content or the superficiality of their messages. (But we are indebted to them for helping us to recognize that Modern architecture too has a content and a vapid one at that.) Just as Lichtenstein has borrowed the techniques and images of the comics to convey satire, sorrow, and irony rather than violent high adventure, so may the architect's high reader suggest sorrow, irony, love, the human condition, happiness, or merely the purpose within, rather than the necessity to buy soap or the possibility of an orgy. On the other hand, the interpretation and evaluation of symbolic content in architecture is an ambiguous process. The didactic symbolism of Chartres may represent to some the subtleties of medieval theology and to others the depths of medieval superstition or manipulation. Manipulation is not the monopoly of crass commercialism. And manipulation works both ways: Commercial interests and the billboard lobby manipulate, but so do cultural lobbies and design review boards, when they use their intimidating prestige to promote antisign legislation and beautification.

SUMMARY

The progressive, technological, vernacular, process-oriented, superficially socially concerned, heroic and original content of Modern architecture has been discussed before by critics and historians. Our point is that this content did not flow inevitably from the solving of functional problems but arose from Modern architects' unexplicated iconographic preferences and was manifest through a language—several languages—of form, and that formal languages and associational systems are inevitable and good, becoming tyrannies only when we are unconscious of them. Our other point is that the content of the unacknowledged symbolism of current Modern architecture is silly. We have been designing dead ducks.

We do not know if the time will come for serious architectural oceanographic urbanism, for example, as opposed to the present offshore posturing of the world futurist architectural visionaries. We suspect that one day it may, though hardly in the forms now envisioned. As practicing architects in the here and now, we do not have much interest in such predictions. We do know, however, that the chief resources of our society go into things with little architectural potential: war, electronic communication, outer space, and, to a much lesser extent, social serv

APPENDIX:

ON DESIGN REVIEW BOARDS AND FINE ARTS COMMISIONS

Excerpts from an interview, May 1971, with Professor Jesse Dukeminier, Law School, University of California, Los Angeles.

“Design Review Boards raise certain constitutional issues. Lawyers speak of them in terms of ‘due process,’ and ‘equal protection of the law.’ Due process means a fair hearing, and equal protection means no arbitrary discrimination. There are two ways to achieve these:

1. By building standards into the legal system.

2. Where the problem is not amenable to quantifying the standard, by building fairness into procedures, by requiring accountability in the exercise of discretion.

“There are certain standards that have long controlled the design of buildings. In zoning, for example, we have set-back lines, bulk controls, and height limitations. These are standards that an architect can work within because they really don’t involve very much discretion, and every person who has ability is subjected to them. If these standards are laid down in advance by the City, one architect cannot say that he is particularly discriminated against, though he might disagree with the standard itself.”

“Where we can’t lay down standards, where the problem is not amenable to standards, we appoint a board and give it discretion. The Board must be accountable in the exercise of its discretion. We have in the American system of government various ways of making persons in power accountable for their actions. Judges, for example, have great discretion, but they have to write opinions. They can’t rule for one party without saying why. They can be criticized when they have opened their minds for criticism by writing an opinion or giving an opinion. This is a great protection.”

“From a legal point of view the heart of the problem with Design Review Boards is that:

1. There are no standards laid down to guide them.

2. They have broad discretion, and we have not built into the system any way of making them accountable for their actions.” The courts have ruled that beauty is an urban amenity to be sought through the police powers, review boards, and other regulatory measures; but they have omitted to set the standards by which beauty may be defined or the processes through which it may be equitably judged to be present. Local authorities have reacted by appointing “experts” (usually local architects) who use their own discretion in assigning beauty or lack of it to the works of others. The limits set on capricious

“Complexities and Contradictions,” Progressive Architecture, May 1965, pp. 168-174.

Love, Nancy, “The Architectural Rat Race,” Greater Philadelphia Magazine, December 1965, pp. 55ff.

Osborn, Michelle (in consultation with Romaldo Giurgola), “A Personal Kind of House,” The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, October 15, 1965, p. 55. (Venturi House.)

“Paths of Younger Architects,” The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, March 3, 1965.

“Robert Venturi,” Arts and Architecture, April 1965, p. 22.

“Venturi’s Philadelphia Fountain Exemplifies Vernacular Urban Scale,” South Carolina AIA Review of Architecture, 1965, pp. 29-31.

“Are Young Architects Designing Prototypes of Your Future Models?” American Builder, October 1966, pp. 60-71. (Venturi House.)

“Dynamic Design with Angular Planes,” House and Garden Building Guide, Spring/Summer 1966, pp. 132-135.

McCoy, Esther, “Young Architects: The Small Office,” Arts and Architecture, February-March 1966, p. 28.

Scott Brown, Denise, “Team 10, Perspecta 10 and the Present State of Architectural Theory” (see Section C).

Scully, Vincent, “America’s Architectural Nightmare: The Motorized Megalopolis,” Holiday, March 1966, pp. 94ff.

Stern, Robert A. M., 40 under 40, Architectural League of New York, 1966. (Catalog for exhibit at the Architectural League of New York.)

___, “Review of L'architecture d'aujourd'hui Issue on USA '65," Progressive Architecture, May 1966, pp. 256, 266.

“Venturi House—Mannerist”, Architectural Review, February 1966, p. 49.

Blake, Peter, Architectural Forum, June 1967, pp. 56-57. (Review of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture; discussion, July 1967, p. 16.)

Colquhoun, Alan, “Robert Venturi,” Architectural Design, August 1967, p. 362.

Lobell, John, “Both-And: A New Architectural Concept,” Arts, February 1968, pp. 12-13.

McCoy, Esther, “Buildings in the United States,” Lotus, vol. 4, 1967/8, pp. 15-123.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian, “Less or More?,” Architectural Review, April 1968, p. 257-258.

Osborn, Michelle, “Dilemma in a Time of Change,” The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, April 26, 1968. (Brighton Beach.)

“Pop Architecture,” Architecture Canada, October 1968.

Record of Submissions and Awards, Competition for Middle Income Housing at Brighton Beach, HDA, City of New York, Brooklyn, 1968. (Jury comments.)

“Two New Buildings by Venturi and Rauch,” Progressive Architecture, November 1968, pp. 116-123. (Fire Station #4, Columbus, Indiana, and the Medical Office Building, Bridgeton, N.J.)

Berson, Lenore, “South Street Insurrection,” Philadelphia Magazine, September 1969, pp. 87-91ff.

“Education and Extension,” Art Gallery of Ontario Annual Report 1969-70. (On Bauhaus Lectures by Venturi.)

Huxtable, Ada Louise, “The Case for Chaos,” The New York Times, January 26, 1969, Section 2. Reprinted in Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?, 1970.

Jencks, Charles, “Points of View,” Architectural Design, December 1969. (Football Hall of Fame.)

Jenson, Robert, “Resort Hotels: Symbols and Associations in Their Design,” Architectural Record, December 1969, pp. 119-123.

Love, Nancy, “The Deflatable Fair,” Philadelphia Magazine, April 1969, pp. 137-140. (Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi on the Bicentennial.)

Richard, Paul, “Learning from Las Vegas,” The Washington Post, January 19, 1969, The Arts, pp. k1, k8.

___, “Learning from Las Vegas,” Today’s Family Digest, November 1969, pp. 12-17.

Scully, Vincent, “A Search for Principle Between Two Wars,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, June 1969, pp. 240-247. (A

——, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?, New York: Macmillan Company, 1970, pp. 186-187.

“In Defense of the Strip,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects, December 1970, p. 64. (On Las Vegas.)

Jacobs, Jay, “A Commitment to Excellence,” The Art Gallery, December 1970, pp. 17-32.

Kurtz, Stephen A., “Toward an Urban Vernacular,” Progressive Architecture, July 1970, pp. 100-105.

“Mathematics at Yale: Readers’ Response,” Architectural Forum, October 1970, pp. 64-66. See also “Your Point of View,” Progressive Architecture, November 1970.

“Ordinary as Artform,” Progressive Architecture, April 1970, pp. 106-109. (Lieb House.)

Osborn, Michelle, “The Ugly American Architect,” Philadelphia Magazine, April 1970, pp. 52-56.

Pawley, Martin, “Leading from the Rear,” Architectural Design, January 1970, p. 45. (See also reply to Pawley, Architectural Design, July 1970.)

Reif, Rita, “A Family Who Built a ‘Real Dumb House’ in a ‘Banal Environment’,” The New York Times, August 17, 1970, p. 22L. (Lieb House.)

“Saint Francis de Sales Church,” Liturgical Arts, August 1970, pp. 124-126.

Schulze, Franz, “Chaos as Architecture,” Art in America, July/August 1970, pp. 88-96. (Discussion of the philosophy and work of Venturi and Rauch. Reply, November 1970.)

“Seventeenth Annual Progressive Architecture Design Awards,” Progressive Architecture, January 1970, pp. 76-135. (Robert Venturi juror.)

Sica, Paolo, L'immagine della città da Sparta a Las Vegas. Bari: Laterza, 1970.

Smith, C. Ray, “Electric Demolition, A Milestone in Church Art: St. Francis de Sales, Philadelphia,” Progressive Architecture, September 1970, pp. 92-95.

“Zoning Rebuilds the Theatre,” Progressive Architecture, December 1970, pp.76ff.

Papachristou, Tician, and James Stewart Polshek, “Venturi: Style, not Substance,” The New York Times, November 14, 1971, p. 24D.

“Robert Venturi,” Architecture and Urbanism, Japan, October 1971. (Issue devoted to the work of Venturi and Rauch.)

“Robert Venturi,” Kenchiku Bunka, March 1971, pp. 84-94.

Scully, Vincent, “The Work of Venturi and Rauch, Architects and Planners,” Whitney Museum of American Art, September 1971. (Exhibit pamphlet.)

“Venturi and Rauch,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, December-January 1971-1972, pp. 84-104 and cover. (Plans 1964-1970; Yale Mathematics Building; Trubek and Wislocki houses; Crosstown Community; California City.)

“Venturi and Rauch Projects Shown in New York,” Architectural Record, November 1971, p. 37.

Vrchota, Janet, “Bye, Bye Bauhaus,” Print, September/October 1971, pp. 66-67. (On Venturi and Rauch exhibit at Whitney Museum.)

“Yale Mathematics Building,” Architectural Design, February 1971, p. 115.

“Aprendiendo de Todas Las Cosas,” Arte Y Comento, Bilbao, November 20, 1972.

“Arquitectura Pop,” El Comercio, Lima, Aberlardo Oquerdo, April 16, 1972. (Review of Aprendiendo.)

Blasi, Cesare and Gabriella, “Venturi,” Casabella, No. 364, April 1972, pp. 15-19.

“Brown, D.S., y Venturi, R.; ‘Aprendiendo de Todas Las Cosas’,” ABC, Miguel Perer Ferrero, Madrid, April 26, 1972.

Corrigan, Peter, “Reflection on a New American Architecture: The Venturis,” Architecture in Australia, February 1972, pp. 55-66.

Cuadernos de Arquitectura, Barcelona, January 1972. (Review of Aprendendo.)

Davis, Douglas, “From Forum to Strip,” Newsweek, October 1972, p. 38.

Donohoe, Victoria, “Buildings: Good and Bad,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 30, 1972, p. 18.

Drew, Philip, Third Generation: The Changing Meaning of Architecture. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972, pp. 35, 42, 48, 152ff, 160,

Schwartz, Marty, “Radical-Radical Confrontation: I.V. Is Almost All Right,” UCSB Daily News, November 16, 1972, p. 5.

Sealander, John. “Appreciating the Architectural UGLY,” The Highlander, University of California at Riverside, November 30, 1972.

“Unas notas sobre, ‘Aprendiendo de todas las cosas,’ de Robert Venturi,” Gerardo Delgado, Jose Ramon Sierra, El Correo de Andalusia, May 2, 1972.

“Un diseño per al consumisme,” Serra D’Or, Oriul Bohigas, February 1972, p. 18. (Review of Aprendiendo.)

Vandevanter, Peter, “Unorthodox Architect,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, Alumni Adventures, December 12, 1972, p. 15.

___, “Venturi: Controversial Philadelphia Architect,” The Daily Princetonian, February 26, 1972, p. 55ff.

Vermel, Ann, On the Scene, Hartford Stage Company, January 1972, pp. 1-2.

Waroff, Deborah, “The Venturis—American Selection,” Building Design, no. 113, August 4, 1972, pp. 12-13.

Wines, James, “The Case for the Big Duck: Another View,” Architectural Forum, April 1972, pp. 60-61, 72.

1973

“Award of Merit,” House and Home, May 1973, pp. 116-117.

“Best Houses of 1973,” American Home, September 1973, p. 52.

Blanton, John, “Learning from Las Vegas,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects, February 1973, pp. 56ff.

Carney, Francis, “The Summa Popologica of Robert (‘Call Me Vegas’) Venturi,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, May 1973, pp. 242-244.

Cook, John W. and Klotz, Heinrich, Conversations With Architects. New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1973. Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, reprinted as “Ugly is Beautiful: The Main Street School of Architecture,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1973, pp. 33-43.

“En Passant Par Las Vegas,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, September 1973, pp. 28-34. (Review of Learning from Las Vegas.)

Silver, Nathan, “Learning from Las Vegas,” The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1973, pp. 5-6.

“Some Decorated Sheds or Towards an Old Architecture,” Progressive Architecture, May 1973, pp. 86-89.

Stern, Robert, “Stompin’ at the Savoye,” Architectural Forum, May 1973, pp.46-48.

“Strip Building,” Times Literary Supplement, April 6, 1973, p. 366.

von Moos, Stanislaus, “Learning from Las Vegas/Venturi et al.,” Neue Züricher Zeitung, September 1973.

Wolf, Gary, Review of Learning from Las Vegas, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, October 1973, pp. 258-260.

Wright, L., “Robert Venturi and Anti-Architecture,” Architectural Review, April 1973, pp. 262-264.

“A Pair of Seaside Summer Cottages,” Second Home, Spring-Summer 1974, pp. 68-71.

Allen, Gerald, “Venturi and Rauch’s Humanities Building for the Purchase Campus of the State University of New York,” Architectural Record, October 1974, pp. 120-124.

Batt, Margaret, “Historical Foundation Picks Strand Planners,” The Galveston Daily News, Sunday, November 24, 1974, p. 1.

Beardsley, Monroe, “Learning from Las Vegas,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Winter 1974, pp. 245-246.

Campbell, Robert, “Yale Sums Up State of the Arts,” The Boston Globe, Sunday, December 22, 1974, p. 26A.

Ciucci, Giorgio, “Walt Disney World,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, December 1974, pp. 42-51.

Cohen, Stuart, “Physical Context/Cultural Context: Including It All,” Oppositions 2, January 4, 1974, pp. 1-40.

DeSeta, Cesare, “Robert Venturi, dissacrature e provocatore,” Casabella, No. 394, October 1974, pp. 2-5.

Faghih, Nasrine, “Sémiologie du signe sans message,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité. December 1974, pp. 35-40.

Farney, Dennis, “The School of ‘Messy Vitality’,” The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 1974, p. 20.

Yale Architectural Journal," Rassegna dell'Istituto di architettura e urbanistica, University of Rome, August-December, 1974, pp. 99-125.

Schmertz, Mildred F., “Vincent Scully versus Charles Moore,” Architectural Record, December 1974, p. 45.

Schulze, Franz, “Toward an ‘Impure’ Architecture,” Dialogue, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1974, pp. 54-63.

Scully, Vincent, The Shingle Style Today. New York: Braziller, 1974.

Sky, Alison, “On Iconology,” On Site 5/6 On Energy, 1974. (Interview with Denise Scott Brown.)

Sorkin, Michael, “Robert Venturi and the Function of Architecture at the Present Time,” Architectural Association Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1974, pp. 31-35. (See also letters in Vol. 7, No. 1.)

Tafuri, Manfredo, “L’Architecture dans le boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language,” Oppositions 3, May 1974, pp. 37-62.

Treu, Piera Gentile, Della complessità in architettura: Problemi di composizione urbana nella teorica di Robert Venturi. Padua: Tipografia “La Garangola,” 1974.

“21st Awards Program: A Year of Issues,” Progressive Architecture, January 1974, pp. 52-89. (Denise Scott Brown juror.)

“Venturi,” Architecture Plus, March/April 1974, p. 80.

“Venturi and Rauch 1970-74,” Architecture and Urbanism, Japan, November 1974. (Issue devoted to the work of Venturi and Rauch.)

Zobl, Engelbert, “Architektur USA—East II: Robert Venturi—John Rauch,” Architektur Aktuell—Fach Journal, April 1974, pp. 17-18.

Berliner, Donna Israel and David C., “Thirty-six Women with Real Power Who Can Help You,” Cosmopolitan, April 1975, pp. 195-196.

Goldberger, Paul, “Tract House, Celebrated,” The New York Times Magazine, September 14, 1975, pp. 68-69, 74. (On the Brant house.)

Hine, Thomas, “East Poplar’s Curious ‘Victory’,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 29, 1975. (Fairmount Manor and Poplar Community project.)

___, “Pretzel-Land Welcomes the World,” The Philadelphia In-

Hoffman, Donald, "Art Talk," The Kansas City Star, February 8, 1976, p. 3D. (Exhibition at Kansas City Art Institute.)

Hughes, Robert, “Overdressing for the Occasion,” Time, April 5, 1976, pp. 42, 47. (Review of “200 Years of American Sculpture.”)

Huxtable, Ada Louise, “The Fall and Rise of Main Street,” The New York Times Magazine, May 30, 1976, pp. 12-14. (Includes Galveston project.)

___, “The Gospel According to Giedion and Gropius is under Attack,” The New York Times, June 27, 1976, pp. 1, 29, Section 2.

___, “The Pop World of the Strip and the Sprawl,” The New York Times, March 21, 1976, p. 28D. (Review of “Signs of Life.”)

Kleihues, Josef Paul (Organizer), Dortmunder Architekturausstellung 1976. Dortmund: Dortmunder Architekturhefte No. 3, 1976. (Catalog of an architecture exhibition that includes work of Venturi and Rauch.)

Kramer, Hilton, “A Monumental Muddle of American Sculpture,” The New York Times, March 28, 1976, pp. 1–34D. (Review of “200 Years of American Sculpture.”)

Kron, Joan, "Photo Finishes," New York, March 22, 1976, pp. 56-57.

Lebensstejn, Jean-Claude, "Hyperéalisme, Kitsch et 'Venturi'," Critique, February 1976, pp. 99-135.

Lipstadt, Hélène R., “Interview with R. Venturi and D. Scott Brown,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, in press.

Marvel, Bill, “On Reading the American Cityscape,” National Observer, April 19, 1976. (Review of “Signs of Life”.)

Miller, Robert L., “New Haven’s Dixwell Fire Station by Venturi and Rauch,” Architectural Record, June 1976, pp. 111-116.

Morton, David, “Venturi and Rauch, Brant House, Greenwich, Conn.,” Progressive Architecture, August 1976, pp. 50-53.

“Off the Skyline and into the Museum,” Newsday, April 14, 1976, pp. 4-5 A.

Orth, Maureen, with Lucy Howard, “Schlock Is Beautiful,” Newsweek, March 8, 1976, p.56. (Review of “Signs of Life.”

Pfister, Harold, “Exhibitions,” The Decorative Arts Newsletter, Society of Architectural Historians, Summer 1976, pp. 3-5.

Quinn, Jim, “Dumb is Beautiful,” “Learning from Our Living Rooms,” Philadelphia Magazine, October 1976, pp. 156ff.

“Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” Perspecta 9-10, 1965, pp. 17-56. (Extract.)

Complexity and Contradiction In Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art and Graham Foundation, 1966. Translated into Japanese, 1969; into French, 1971; into Spanish, 1972.

“Selection from: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” Zodiac 17, 1967, pp. 123-126.

“Three Projects: Architecture and Landscape, Architecture and Sculpture, Architecture and City Planning,” Perspecta 11, 1967, pp. 103-106.

“Trois bâtiments pour une ville de l’Ohio,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, December 1967-January 1968, pp. 37-39.

“A Bill-Ding Board Involving Movies, Relics and Space,” Architectural Forum, April 1968, pp. 74-76. (Football Hall of Fame Competition.)

“On Architecture,” L’Architecture d’aujord’hui, September 1968, pp. 36-39.

“Architecture as Shelter with Decoration on It, and a Plea for a Symbolism of the Ordinary in Architecture,” 1975. (Unpublished.)

“Plain and Fancy Architecture by Cass Gilbert at Oberlin,” Apollo, February 1976, pp. 6-9.

C. WRITINGS BY DENISE SCOTT BROWN

“Form, Design and the City,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, November 1962. (Film review.)

“City Planning and What It Means to Me to Be a City Planner,” March 1963. Unpublished.

“Report on the Neighborhood Garden Association,” Philadelphia, March 1963. Unpublished.

“Urban Structuring,” Architectural Design, January 1968, p. 7. (Review of Urban Structuring: Studies of Alison and Peter Smithson.)

“Urbino,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, September 1968, pp. 344-46. (Review of Giancarlo de Carlo, Urbino.)

“On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners. May 1969, pp. 184-186.

“Education in the 1970’s—Teaching for an Altered Reality,” Architectural Record, October 1970.

“On Analysis and Design,” unpublished, 1970.

“Reply to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy and Ulrich Franzen,” unpublished, September 4, 1970, p. 6. (Co-op City controversy.)

“Learning from Pop,” and “Reply to Frampton,” Casabella, 389/360, May-June 1971, pp. 14-46. (Reprinted in Journal of Popular Culture, Fall 1973, pp. 387-401.)

“Evaluation of the Humanities Building at Purchase” (with Elizabeth and Steven Izenour), Architectural Record, October 1974, p. 122.

“Giovanni Maria Cosco, 1926-1973,” Rassegna dell’Istituto di Architettura e Urbanistica, University of Rome, August-December 1974, pp. 127-129.

“On Formal Analysis as Design Research, With Some Notes on Studio Pedagogy,” unpublished, 1975.

“Sexism and the Star System in Architecture,” unpublished, 1975.

“Symbols, Signs and Aesthetics: Architectural Taste in a Pluralist Society,” unpublished, 1975.

“House Language” (with Elizabeth Izenour, Missy Maxwell, and Janet Schueren), American Home, August 1976. (On “Signs of Life.”)

“On Architectural Formalism and Social Concern: A Discourse for Social Planners and Radical Chic Architects,” Oppositions 5, Summer 1976, pp. 99-112.

“Yale Mathematics Building,” unpublished, 1971.

Learning from Las Vegas (with Steven Izenour). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972.

“Bicentenaire de L’Indépendance Américaine,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, November 1973, pp. 63-69.

“Functionalism, Yes, But …” in Architecture and Urbanism, November 1974, pp. 33-34, and in Architecturas Bis, January 1975, pp. 1-2.

Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, revised edition (with Steven Izenour). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977.

E. WRITINGS BY DENISE SCOTT BROWN AND ROBERT VENTURI

“On Ducks and Decoration,” Architecture Canada, October 1968, p. 48.

“The Bicentennial Commemoration 1976.” Architectural Forum, October 1969, pp. 66-69.

“Venturi v. Gowan,” Architectural Design, January 1969, pp. 31-36.

“Co-op City: Learning to Like It,” Progressive Architecture, February 1970, pp. 64-73.

“The Highway,” Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art, 1970. (Text to the catalog for the exhibit by the Institute of Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Rice University and the Akron Art Institute.)

Aprendiendo de Todas Las Cosas. Barcelona: Tusquets Editor, 1971. (Compilation of articles; reviews are listed under 1972 in Section A.)

CREDITS

In Part I, photographs not credited were taken by faculty and students of the Learning from Las Vegas studio, Yale University.

1. Denise Scott Brown

2. Douglas Southworth

3. Allan D'Arcangelo

4. Glen Hodges

5. Glen Hodges

6. United Aerial Survey

7. Reproduced by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers, from Peter Blake, God's Own Junkyard. Copyright 1964 by Peter Blake.

8. Robert Venturi

9. Glen Hodges

10. Giovanni Battista Nolli, Nuova Pianta di Roma Data in Luce da Giambattista Nolli, L'Anno MDCCXL VIII, Rome, 1748. Plate 19.

11. Landis Aerial Surveys

19, 20. Douglas Southworth

21, 22. Ralph Carlson, Tony Farmer

24-27. Ralph Carlson, Tony Farmer

23. Douglas Southworth

24. Ron Filson, Martha Wagner

25. Ralph Carlson, Tony Farmer

30, 33. Douglas Southworth

36. Las Vegas News Bureau

37-39. Photos from personal file of John F. Cahlan, Las Vegas, Nevada

40. Las Vegas News Bureau

41. Robert Venturi

42, 43. Peter Hoyt

44. Las Vegas News Bureau

47-49. Peter Hoyt

51. Caesars Palace, Las Vegas

52. Robert Venturi

55, 56. Caesars Palace, Las Vegas

57. Deborah Marum

58. Piranesi, Ron Filson, Martha Wagner

59. Ron Filson, Martha Wagner

60. Robert Venturi

61. Victor Vasarely, Galérie Denise René, Paris

62. Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce

63. Glen Hodges

64. Reproduced by permission of Holt, Rinear and Winston, Publishers, from Peter Blake's, God's Own Junkyard. Copyright1964 by Peter Blake.

65. Standard Oil Co., New Jersey

75, 76. Robert Venturi

77. Reproduced by permission of Verlag Gerd Hatje GMBH, Stuttgart, from Schwab, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph, Robert Perron

78. William Watkins

from R. Buckminster Fuller, Robert W. Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, copyright 1960 by R. Buckminster Fuller

130, 131. Reproduced by permission of Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., from G.E. Kidder-Smith, Italy Builds

132. Reproduced by permission of Verlag Gerd Hatje GMBH, Stuttgart, from Le Corbusier, Creation is a Patient Search

133. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr.

134. Damora

135. George Cserna

136. Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum

137. Peter Papademetriou

138. Robert Venturi

139. Denise Scott Brown

140. Reproduced by permission of Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., copyright 1967, from Peter Cook, Architecture: Action and Plan

141. Learning from Levittown studio, Yale University, Robert Miller

142. Learning from Levittown studio, Yale Univeristy, Evan Lanman

143. Learning from Levittown studio, Yale Universit

144. Las Vegas News Bureau

145. Robert Venturi

ARCHITECTURE

Learning from Las Vegas The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

A revised edition of Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour

Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of “common” people and less immodest in their erections of “heroic,” self-aggrandizing monuments.

This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas Strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm's work.

Here are some of the comments about the book that followed its first publication:

“I will go clearly on the record by saying that I think these studies are brilliant …”

“Their insight and analysis, reasoned back through the history of style and symbolism and forward to the recognition of a new kind of building that responds directly to speed, mobility, the superhighway and changing life styles, is the kind of art history and theory that is rarely produced. The rapid evolution of modern architecture from Le Corbusier to Brazil to Miami to the roadside motel in a brief 40-year span, with all of the behavioral esthetics involved, is something neither architect nor historian has deigned to notice …”-Ada Louise Huxtable, The New York Times

“It is a challenging, sound position which should help continue the expansion of architecture in positive directions.

“For the historian, Learning from Las Vegas is a brilliant document of the times, a review of our architectural heritage from a theoretical standpoint, and a work which uses history knowledgeably, skillfully, and creatively: a rarity. It is a book to be disagreed with, to be challenged, to be read. The small moot points of contention spiral into philosophical queries of the nature of architecture itself.”—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

“These designers have launched an assault—professionally informed, competitively astute, and perversely brilliant—on the dominant modes of modernism in architecture.”—The Yale Review

“Venturi has written a dangerous book… It inverts the ideas that many have based their professional lives upon. It threatens those things that we use to distinguish the difference between us, the cultured, and them, the vulgar. It is difficult to accept the idea of the citizens of our ‘know-nothing culture’ knowing more about the world they live in than the trained cultured architect and their insolence in preferring it.”—The Ohio Review

The MIT Press

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142