Learning from Las Vegas, revised edition Book Summary

'Learning from Las Vegas' challenges traditional architectural aesthetics by celebrating the flamboyant and often dismissed design of Las Vegas. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour advocate for a broader understanding of what constitutes meaningful architecture, emphasizing the role of commercial and vernacular styles. The revised edition offers fresh insights and critiques, inviting readers to reconsider the relationship between culture, space, and identity. With vibrant illustrations and compelling arguments, the authors explore how the 'Vegas ethos' can inform contemporary design. This provocative work not only reshapes architectural theory but also compels us to question our preconceptions about beauty and functionality in the built environment.

By Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour

Published: 1977

""The architecture of Las Vegas suggests that we can learn more from the everyday, the banal, and the symbols of popular culture than from the grand ideals of historical architecture.""

Book Review of Learning from Las Vegas, revised edition

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.

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"The architecture of Las Vegas suggests that we can learn more from the everyday, the banal, and the symbols of popular culture than from the grand ideals of historical architecture."

Learning from Las Vegas, revised edition

By Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour