The Centurion in the Parking Lot

From n+1 magazine, originally published by Paper Monument…

“Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.” March 21 – June 20, 2010. Pacific Design Center, MOCA.

“Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas.” September 18, 2008 – January 4, 2009. SFMOMA.

Las Vegas was once assessed as “the grand proletarian cultural locomotive.” It is unlikely that anyone would venture such an appraisal today, even if a demographically more precise “bourgeoisie” now stood in for the proles. But this was not a farfetched metaphor at the time of coinage: Las Vegas was originally a railway town, and in 1968 it still had a public station. Californians, always the city’s chief patrons, could arrive via locomotive in a matter of hours. Nevertheless, they usually drove. Drive-ins and -throughs were booming. Cinemas, churches, restaurants, post offices, liquor stores; never had a city catered so comprehensively to the motorist.

So when Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and their students at the Yale School of Architecture arrived in Las Vegas, much of the curiosity that drove them was automotive in nature. The group visited Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard—the Strip—to document and theorize the city’s vernacular architecture, and their findings eventually formed the counterintuitive classic, Learning from Las Vegas. “Research,” in their rigorously free-wheeling view, was often as simple as pointing a camera out of a car window. Of the many angles from which the group approached the city during their architectural census, the view from the blacktop pervades. More…