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

Visible Language, 2003 by Whiteley, Nigel

...its formlessness and tastelessness - by the standards of established culture, that is. The scatter along the strip had no discernible plan; the signs were simply commercial art raised to an intense pitch.... Whereas the great image of Manhattan had been of an undesigned but distinct form composed of designed elements of architecture, that of Las Vegas appeared to be an indistinct and undesigned formlessness composed of elements that feil below the threshold of architectural attention.46

To have "formlessness and tastelessness" would be a condemnation in conventional critical terms, but it is these very aspects that Banham finds attractive because they "challenge orthodoxies" and provide a "sense of possibilities" that is not based on the predictable or tried-and-tested. Venturi et al. were also sympathetic to sprawl, describing how the Strip by day "is not enclosed and directed as in traditional cities. Rather, it is open and indeterminate, identified by points in space and patterns on the ground...."47 But they seemed concerned that the Strip in daytime "reads as chaos if you perceive only its forms and exclude its symbolic content."48 The symbolism may have rescued it from the chaos for Venturi et al., but for Banham it was an expression, not only of a new, alternative, non-professional aesthetic, but also a freedom: "for anyone who found anything good in the Vegas environment, established procedures of town planning and standards of aesthetic control had to be wrong. The place didn't so much flout those standards-simple opposition would have left the argument with its original polarities-it simply ignored them, which made new polarities necessary."49 In his 1967 review of Wolfe's book, the nub of his argument was class-related: "what Wolfe had discovered in Las Vegas was the mad money of a relaxed proletariat conjuring up a culture and a visual style that had never been seen anywhere else in the world."50 Las Vegas' "formlessness" represented an alternative to tastefulness, and an acceptance of it showed you were willing to reject "a culture based on aristocratic taste" and embrace the uncertainty and possibilities of "one based in freeform self-fulfillment...."51 The reason for a rejection of Las Vegas' formlessness might, ultimately, be political rather than aesthetic, an "elitist suppression by a cultural Establishment."52 Although other interpretations of the political implications of Las Vegas were in currency,53 Banham held to his opinion that Las Vegas was a city that expressed not only a new aesthetic but also a democratic social order appropriate to the consumer capitalism of the second Machine Age.54

"Formlessness and tastelessness" bring to mind Venturi et al.'s term "ugly and ordinary" in that both terms require inverted commas. The latter requires them so as to signal that they are making use of conventions which are normally dismissed by professionals as ugly and ordinary as opposed to the more aspirational "heroic and original,"55 but they are using them in a way that "...[tjhey are not merely ordinary but represent ordinariness symbolically and stylistically...."54 Banham's term is also used conventionally to describe Las Vegas and, like Venturi et al., he is turning a term of abuse into a desirable attribute. However, the difference is that Venturi et al. are using "ugly and ordinary" architecture as a source for a sophisticated, high culture architecture-in the same way as a Pop artist uses sources-whereas Banham is not using "formlessness and tastefulness" as a source for high culture, but as an end in itself. The lesson is one of challenging orthodoxies and changing our paradigms of what is visually and politically acceptable and desirable. The application of the lesson of Las Vegas was "Non-Plan," a proposal for the suspension of planning in England to encourage a "plunge into heterogeneity"57 based on the supposition that "Fremont Street in Las Vegas or Sunset Strip in Beverly Hills represent the living architecture of our age."58