“The basic premise of Learning from Las Vegas is that the car has significantly shaped the form of the contemporary American city.” This simple statement seems so manifestly obvious: both trivial and unassailable. Yet in the hands of Martino Stierli, it is embedded almost exactly at the center of a tour-de-force analysis of one of the key texts in the history of postmodernism as a defining axis of American architecture and urbanism: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972; 2nd rev. paperback ed., 1977).

Stierli’s own text, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror, brings to bear an impressive array of sources, a profound knowledge of architectural history and urbanism, as well as numerous contextual disciplines, to dissect Learning from Las Vegas as a research seminar, a published artifact, a sophisticated analytical program, an ideological statement, and the epicenter of a debate about the form of the American city—and the nature and value of culture—that has continued long after its original object, the old Las Vegas of Fremont Street and the Strip, has ceased to exist except as a memory or a historical artifact in its own right.

In constructing his analysis, Stierli is careful always to place Venturi and Scott Brown’s work within an appropriate historical context; but always the book circles back to a pair of related problems: the impact of [auto]mobility on the evolution of urban form in general, and the conflict between the historically determined and enclosed form of the European city and the wide-open possibilities of sprawling de-centered urban development inherent (especially) in the empty vastness of the American West.

At the heart of these debates, there is always the issue of the relationship between Venturi and Scott Brown’s project and the competing visions of any number of non-overlapping modernisms, as well as that vision of history embodied in Venturi’s brilliantly polemical Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). And Stierli is alive to their continuing relevance throughout his attempt to disentangle all the strands of the story that he lays out.

One of the most fascinating episodes comes early on as Stierli leads us through the original transformation of the Yale Architecture School’s LLV Research Studio’s work (their “grand proletarian cultural locomotive”) into the original splashy publication, designed by award-winning Muriel Cooper for the MIT Press.

When, as a college undergraduate, I first saw a copy of the 1972 edition, I was blown away by its sheer size, the open layout, the amazing graphics, the chaotic photographs of the Strip which now made perfect visual—if not aesthetic—sense, and the cover with its radical semi-transparent glassine jacket. I was rather put off by the $25 price tag; but the book was a revelation and seemed a for-sure validation of my culture.

Alas, what I didn’t know; Venturi and Scott Brown hated the design, they feuded constantly with designer Cooper, and (worst of all) many of the most brilliant design moves were rooted precisely in the modernist, especially Swiss, typographical and design traditions that the authors saw as hopelessly elitist and contrary to their entire vernacular orientation. Nevertheless, it was precisely this historic rootedness with its elite modernist gloss, skillfully tweaked by Cooper, that most lucidly embodied the authors’ radically new approach: a nascent postmodern triumph not surprisingly missed by many critics. The revised 1977 paperback edition was much more academic in design, produced under the immediate direction of the authors, much less legible in its presentation (and much cheaper). It was still, despite these flaws, a classic.

The most complex of the topics covered by Stierli, is the dense, contentious, and ongoing discourse surrounding the terms “high” and “low,” “Pop” (as in Pop Art or Pop Architecture), “popular,” and “mass” (as in mass or popular culture). Here, Stierli takes a labyrinthine journey that reaches from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to Tom Wolfe and Martin Gans. The arguments are much too recondite to rehearse here; but they comprise a reading of a serious chunk of 20th-century culture that deserves our equally serious attention.

Meanwhile, the Las Vegas recorded, analyzed, and theorized by Venturi, Scott Brown, and the LLV Research Seminar virtually vanished: metastasized into a global cultural simulacrum, the perfect family vacation destination—plus gambling and showgirls. The transmogrified Strip now sits in the midst of an enormous exurban sprawl, a swarm of identical non-communities servicing the worst nightmare of the urban Imaginary. Yet as I (hopefully) zip through the city on I-15 snapping photos out the car window, I still feel the pull of that original project, and can now thank Martino Stierli for putting it all into a perfectly sharp and moving perspective.

Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film
by Martino Stierli  (translated by Elizabeth Tucker)
Getty Publications, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60606-137-4