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

Visible Language, 2003 by Whiteley, Nigel

The change that was occurring in the arts in the 19605 was nothing less than a paradigm shift, and is best summed up in Rosalind Krauss' phrase "the expanded field." Writing in 1979 in relation to sculpture, Krauss commented on the way that the category "sculpture" had been "kneaded and stretched and twisted" during the 19605 and 'yos to the extent that it may "include just about anything"7 from video installations, through earthworks, to minimally-material concepts-it had become "a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities."8 Venturi et al. and Banham were doing something closely akin to this: challenging orthodoxies and thinking through differently structured possibilities so that the dualistic division into "cathedral or bicycle shed" could become, inter alia, cathedral as (decorated) bicycle shed (as may apply to Venturi et al.), or even cathedral and bicycle shed (as Banham might have argued). Banham's two most important books of the 19608 were Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment (1969). The former reassessed the contribution and importance of the Expressionist wing of Modernism that had been dismissed by historians like Pevsner in favor of the Sachlichkeit, classical one. The latter examined the history, impact and significance of mechanical services in relation to built form, and the extent to which conventional assumptions about "architecture" might be superseded by the more inclusive concept of "fit environment for human activities."' Thus Theory and Design could, in effect, be thought of in terms of offering some alternative, radical cathedral designs from those that Pevsner had lauded, whereas The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment would not necessarily exclude all cathedrals, but it was more likely to focus on the importance of bicycle sheds because a) they had been dismissed by previous generations of historians as unworthy of appreciation and b) they might be an intelligent and functional solution to a problem, rather than one shaped by cultural habits, traditions and customary practices.10 Venturi was seriously challenging orthodoxies by the mid-^oos with, primarily, his call for "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" and his "Justification for a Pop Architecture." Scott Brown wrote "On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning" in 1969, following on from their original, controversial essay on the "Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas" published a year earlier."

Learning from Las Vegas and Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies challenged particular orthodoxies about what those cities represented. Las Vegas had been described by one eminent member of the design establishment as "...among the most brutal, degrading, and corrupt [cities] that consumer society has ever created.... [It] shows just what depths of communicative poverty can be reached by a city left to its own arbitrary development, responsive only to the needs of... casino and motel owners, and to the needs of real estate speculators."12 Los Angeles, according to one commentator, was "...the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable, and most uncivilized major city in the United States. In short a stinking sewer...."13 The conventional wisdom was that the only lesson that could be learned from either city was that both rudely demonstrated the dangers of permissiveness and popular culture without the conventional controls and planning provided by supposedly responsible professionals.