LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS - ROBERT VENTURI, DENIS SCOTT BROWN, STEVEN IZENOUR

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I’m not sure if I’ve ever  read a book in a building designed by the author. My dad’s a big architecture guy, and I’ve seen this book in his house for a few years now, but only on my last trip out to NC did I steal the book from him. I was somewhat familiar with the gist of the book since it features heavily in FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE, the Tom Wolfe book that I believe I read in High School. The book itself came out of a class that Venturi, Brown and Izenour taught at Yale that focused around the Vegas strip, and an attempt to theorize the issues that the strip raises. That triad, Venturi Brown and Izenour go on to found, or be part of the foundation of, Postmodernism as an architectural movement (and architecture being the first field where the term “postmodernism” takes hold), as well as to create numerous world famous buildings, including the Seattle Art Museum. Since LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS  was my daytime walk-around/transit book (due to being paperback and rather slim) I read some of it in the lobby of the museum, within a structure whose philosophical underpinnings are outlined in the book. And you can tell. The thrust of the argument in the book is that the buildings of the last, roughly, 50 years (the book came out in 72) can be broadly broken up into two categories, Ducks and Decorated Sheds. A Duck is their dismissive term for a modernist building. Basically, a Duck is a building whose very shape and structure is the point. They got the term from a roadside attraction on Long Island that’s shaped like a duck. So something like Falling Water or the Fagus Factory are shaped and constructed in a way to help announce what they are and how important they are and how clever the architect is. VBI see this movement as being connected to a sort of Fuller-esq mega-project Utopianism that they also dismiss. The opposite of a Duck is Decorated Shed, which is a basic building that is adorned in such a way to tell you what it is and how it functions. The SAM works like this. As the book itself says, “It is alright to decorate construction, but never construct decoration.” This is an interesting take, and I’m pretty favorable to arguments for abandoning elitist, lofty goals and instead meeting people where they’re actually at. The book points out that architects spend a lot of time designing huge mega-projects that never get built while ignoring the mobile home industry. I’m also partial to the sections about the interiors of casinos, how they seek to create an endless shimmering darkness, like the cave in Aladdin. However, I like a good Duck. Irregardless, it’s also interesting to consider how none of the Vegas stuff that they discuss in the book is there anymore, Vegas has been built and rebuilt 100 times since then. I’d love to hear VBI’s suggestion w/r/t a 2017 massacre memorial. 61 Ducks