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

Visible Language, 2003 by Whiteley, Nigel

Lesson 3: virtual architecture

There was one more lesson that Banham had drawn from Las Vegas, and it is a telling one. It was elucidated in The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, in which he declares:

What defines the symbolic spaces and places of Las Vegas - the superhotels of The Strip, the casino-belt of Fremont Street - is pure environmental power, manifested as colored light.... [T]he fact remains that the effectiveness with which space is defined is overwhelming, the creation of virtual volumes without apparent structure is endemic, the variety and ingenuity of the lighting techniques is encyclopaedic.... And in a view of architectural education that embraced the complete art of environmental management, a visit to Las Vegas would be as mandatory as a visit to the Baths of Caracalla or La Sainte Chapelle.

Banham seems to be anticipating some of the "virtual" design in our own time but, as far as he was concerned, the "point of studying Las Vegas, ultimately, would be to see an example of how far environmental technology can be driven beyond the confines of architectural practice by designers who (for better or worse) are not inhibited by the traditions of architectonic culture, training and taste."59

Banham wittily and perceptively defines Las Vegas as representing a "...change from forms assembled in light to light assembled in forms..."'"-another version of "formlessness," if not "tastelessness." His reference to "colored light" recalls the visionary architecture of Paul Scheerbart and his 1914 book Glasarchitektur with its call for "more colored light!"61 Banham links Scheerbart and Las Vegas directly: the nightscape of the city, he suggests, is an example of what Scheerbart was prophesizing and had "come true in oblique ways he could never have anticipated...."'2 Scheerbart had been one of the prophets rediscovered by Banham in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, and his stature remained high in The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment. Alongside the Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia, he represents Banham's alternative Modernist who challenged orthodoxies and offered a vision of a technologically-based architecture, underpinned by a keen "mechanical sensibility."63

Modernism or Post-Modernism?

However reformist or radical his point of view, Banhara never loses faith in Modernism, and this not only sets him apart from Venturi et al., but also explains the different lessons he draws from Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His commitment to the "mechanical sensibility" and the "technological century" led Banham to champion architects such as Buckminster Fuller, Cedric Price and Archigram. he also was a supporter of the megastructure movement and the Brutalist "bloody-mindedness" shown by Alison and Peter Smithson and James Stirling." In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi et al. vehemently attack The world science futurist metaphysic, the megastructuralist mystique, and the look-Ma-no-buildings environmental suits and pods [which] are a repetition of the mistakes of another generation. Their overdependence on a space-age, futurist, or science-fiction technology parallels the machine aestheticism of the 1920s and approaches its ultimate mannerism. They are, unlike the architecture of the 1920s, artistically a deadend and socially a cop-out.65