LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS... and Los Angeles and Reyner Banham

Visible Language, 2003 by Whiteley, Nigel

ABSTRACT

The influential British architectural historian and theorist Reyner Banham (1922-1988) belonged to the same generation as Robert Venturi (b.1925) and Denise Scott Brown (b.1931) and shared many of their architectural values. This essay shows the great similarities of value and outlook in Learning from Las Vegas and Banham's almost contemporaneous Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971). It then pinpoints areas of disagreement between Venturi et al. and Banham and moves to a discussion of the different authors' views on Las Vegas, drawing on other texts written by Banham around this time. It reveals that the Venturi et al. version of Las Vegas's significance was not the only one in currency in the period when Learning from Las Vegas appeared in its first and second editions, and that the different interpretations of Las Vegas reveal contested architectural values during the period when Modernist values were being challenged by Post-Modern ones.

Learning from Las Vegas has much in common with Banham's Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, and both reveal a permissive sensibility that is symptomatic of the time they were written. The first part of this paper looks at the shared values and parallels between the two books before moving on to significant differences of interpretation about the relationship of Pop and "high" culture. This is followed by Banham's own interpretation of Las Vegas which, while overlapping with much of Venturi et al.'s, suggests some markedly different lessons.

Challenging Orthodoxies

The sort of orthodoxy Venturi et al. and Banham challenged was expressed by Nikolaus Pevsner in An Outline of European Architecture, first published in 1943 and receiving its sixth edition in 1960. "A bicycle shed is a building," the introduction commences, "Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture." This distinction can be traced back to Ruskinian ideas about fundamental differences between architecture and building but, as a Modernist, Pevsner rejects Ruskin's prioritization of ornament and decoration in order to codify a twentieth century, but supposedly transhistorical, aesthetic of architecture which has three aspects:

First, [aesthetic sensations] may be produced by the treatment of walls, proportions of windows, the relation of wall-space to window-space.... secondly, the treatment of the exterior of a building as a whole is aesthetically significant, its contrasts of block against block.... Thirdly, there is the effect of our senses of the treatment of the interior, the sequence of rooms...." Not only are the types of architectural aesthetics described as distinct categories, but they are hierarchical: it is only the third which is unique to architecture: "What distinguishes architecture from painting and sculpture is its spatial quality. In this, and only in this, no other artist can emulate the architect. Thus the history of architecture is primarily a history of man shaping space...1

The tendency to categorize hierarchically in order to define the supposed essentialism of a discipline was typical of other arts up to the 19603. As regards painting, for example, Clement Greenberg, the great proponent of Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly Abstraction contemporaneously with Pevsner's sixth edition of his Outline, published his "Modernist Painting" essay in which he proposed that the artist should seek "that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art." Painting, it followed, might be expected to concentrate on "the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment."2 The reason for this way of thinking about the arts was not just a Victorian-like ten-dency for categorization, or even a desire for the operation of a certain kind of logic, rather it was because, as Greenberg argues, "it would, to be sure, narrow [a discipline's] area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain."3 That commitment to "certainty," with its quest for essentialism and purity, demanded an attitude and aesthetic of exclusiveness, and rejected anything that espoused the more inclusive and immediate values of commercialism. Popular culture was summarily dismissed as "ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who [are] insensitive to the values of genuine culture...."4 Nor did Greenberg welcome the excitingly uncertain and insecure future of the time, open as it was to the "spirit of exploration and experiment" as the pioneer Happenings artist Allan Kaprow put it.5 In art in the 19603, the challenge to orthodoxies included Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Land art, Environments, Happenings and Performances. In architecture, a parallel experimentation was at its most radical in projects emanating from Archigram, Cedric Price, Haus-Rucker-Co, Superstudio, Coop. Himmelblau, Eventstructures Research Group, Ant Farm, Archizoom and Experiments in Art and Technology, among others. 1972 was not only the year of the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas, it also witnessed the publication of the English language edition of Jim Burns' Arthropods: New Urban Futures, the appropriately-named An Without Boundaries, and Harold Rosenberg's De-Definition of Art, all symptomatic of the mood of experimentation and challenge to orthodoxies.4