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

Visible Language, 2003 by Whiteley, Nigel

Openness and inclusiveness

An attitude of openness and a commitment to inclusiveness are fundamental ingredients of both Learning from Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Both cities were characterized, according to their respective authors, by "inclusion." "...[T]He order of the Strip includes" wrote Venturi et al., "it includes at all levels, from a mixture of seemingly incongruous land uses to the mixture of seemingly incongruous advertising media plus a system of neoOrganic or neo-Wrightian restaurant motifs in Walnut Formica. It is not an order dominated by the expert and made easy for the eye. The moving eye in the moving body must work to pick out and interpret a variety of changing, juxtaposed orders...." The reward of this sort of environment was high: "vitality ... may be achieved by an architecture of inclusion...."14 Diversity and pluralism were ends in themselves: "We think the more directions that architecture takes at this point, the better."'5 The alternative of a singular style, uniformity and order-the conventional architectural habits of thought-often resulted in an overwhelming "deadness that results from too great a preoccupation with tastefulness and total design."14 This meant that the architect and planner had to put aside their usual assumptions and even their professional taste culture. It was no good approaching Las Vegas with preconceived opinions: the architect had to suspend disbelief because, Venturi et al. argued, "withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything." One of the problems was that "Architects are out of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at the environment...."" For all the professional's claimed open-mindedness, "there is a fine line between liberalism and old-fashioned class snobbery."18

That old-fashioned snobbery had also militated against Los Angeles being taken seriously by the architectural and planning professions. Books had tended to concentrate on the city's Modernist monuments by the Greene J J Brothers, Wright, Gill and Schindler, thereby excluding the commercial vernacular of hamburger bars and other forms of pop architecture at one extreme, and the freeway structures and other forms of civil engineering at the other. Both of these extremes, Banham argued, "are as crucial to the human ecologies and built environments of Los Angeles as are dated works in classified styles by named architects," for it is the "polymorphous architectures" which blend together to form the "comprehensible unity" that constitutes LA's identity." The inclusiveness may lack order and a clearly defined form, and may even appear chaotic but, like Venturi et al. on Las Vegas, Banham wanted the visitor to LA to suspend their disbe lief, otherwise he or she would experience "confusion rather than variety... because the context has escaped them...."20 A necessary part of understanding the context was the ability to cope with movement as "the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement.... [T]he city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life."21 To do so-and admit its suecess-Banham argued, "threatens the intellectual repose and professional livelihood of many architects, artists, planners and environmentalists because it breaks the rules of urban design that they promulgate in works and writings and teach to their students."22 Professionals, therefore, hated LA as much as they looked down at Las Vegas. However, Banham warned, "The common reflexes of hostility are not a defense of architectural values, but a negation of them, at least in so far as architecture has any part in the thoughts and aspirations of the human race beyond the little private world of the profession."23 LA may have lacked conventional formal cohesion, but it undeniably offered a "sense of possibilities."21