AESTHETIC OR ANAESTHETIC: The Competing Symbols of Las Vegas Strip

Visible Language, 2003 by Bhatt, Ritu

Furthermore, while the book makes a cogent argument for how past associations contribute to design, the methodology proposed in the book starts to come apart when one looks for interpretations for the study of history or for the practice of design. For instance, in one of the diagrams, the A& P parking lot is presented as a logical outcome in the evolution of vast spaces since Versailles. The diagram compares various typologies that include Versailles, the English Garden, Broadacre City Levittown, Highway Interchange and The Strip. The various street symbols, architectural elements and space/sign ratios are diagrammatically and chronologically mapped. In this comparison through history, in which one sees certain patterns disappear and others appear, a linear evolutionary paradigm is reinforced, and the architecture of small buildings and big signs emerges as a natural consequence of evolution through history. On the other hand, the analogies drawn are completely ahistorical, for example, A&P parking lot is described as the parterre of the asphalt landscape, and grids of lampposts are likened to obelisks.15 It is in such analyses the book starts to loose its potential for providing a historical vision or methodological rigor.

Such frustration with the book's methodology is apparent in most reviews published at the time. While acknowledging the momentary brilliance of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour's argument, most reviewers also criticize it for failing to provide a convincing methodology. Fred Koetter's review represents one such critique:

After the fun, after the euphoria, after the diagrams and predictable points have been made, is the architect really serving society by the endorsement of such easy overtures to instant gratification? To be sure, the idea of strip development might certainly provide, by way of optimism, nimble abstraction and a variety of useful "models" for the general "structuring" of an automobile-driven urban pattern; but, at a certain point, the limits of the reference must be ascertained and the question must arise: can the literal extension of the it's-not-so-bad-if-you-look-at-it-right syndrome really transform obvious trash into a model for meaningful environment? But assuming momentarily a condition of semi-analytical detachment, what about the formal lessons of Las Vegas and its abstract lessons in "architectural communications"?...What is the architect to do with all that vitality? Is he to simulate it? Is he to run it through his analytical sieve and learn to produce less than fully animated caricatures of it? May he, in traditional way, use it to represent a version of "popular" vitality, to insinuate a recognition of front-line reality?16

On the other hand, contemporary theorists, particularly Jean Francois Lyotard, Charles Jencks, Hal Foster, Frederic Jameson, have all focused on the book's postmodern laissez-faire approach and rhetoric. More recently, Neil Leach in his Anaesthetics of Architecture has criticized it for desemanticizing and aestheticizing architectural forms. Leach writes, "Yet it is in the abstract handling of form, and their refusal to engage the context of Las Vegas, that the real problems of the book emerge. In decontextualizing the forms of Las Vegas, they desemanticize them, setting up a pattern that is to haunt them, as we shall see, in their builtwork.... It is this principle of aestheticization, then, that allows Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour to remain so oblivious to the sociopolitical questions at the heart of Las Vegas, to anaesthetisize it, and to adapt an approach that is epitomized by their celebration of the advertising hoarding."17