Ipsita Chatterjee
Department of Geography
University of Texas

In 1972, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour published a book called Learning from Las Vegas. The book stirred up controversy in the architectural world. It called for architects to design for ‘common’ people, rather than erecting esoteric monuments that conform to the dictates of whatever contemporary philosophy was in fashion. Las Vegas depicted the garish, the glossy, the over-illuminated, the whimsical, a scandalous outrage against the pristine functionalism of modernist cities and their perfectly proportional rectangular skyscrapers. The book argued that the gloss, the garishness, the brightness, the exaggerated themes, the fantasy of Vegas was honest in its blatant appeal to the common consumer thirsting to
escape the banalities of her /his mundane existence. There was nothing pretentious in the symbolism of the city, nothing hidden, nothing left to the imagination -- the architecture openly displayed what it claimed to actualize – escape from the ordinary. There is no reason, the authors argue, why for instance, a giant steel bloc is more aesthetic, more pure, more correct, than a brightly studded, brassy and be-jeweled pyramid. While the giant steel blocs satisfied the intellectual cravings of planners poring over esoteric functionalism, Las Vegas was honestly un-intellectual in its broader appeal for those un-interested in intellectual stimulation, and more interested in overcoming the banalities of everyday existence.

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