Venturi was a hipster.

New York, New York, Las Vegas: You can go all the way to the torch in Vegas' Statue of Liberty.
I love Las Vegas.

In the span of an hour, you can go from Paris to Egypt to New York, take photos with Brangelina and Britney Spears, and stand directly underneath lions (complete with a lion-rawring soundtrack because, apparently, they sleep 20 hours a day). I know it’s cliché, but Walt Disney himself couldn’t have designed a better theme park for the 21 and over crowd. But Las Vegas is a gimmick; the city is a one-liner. I get the joke and, for three days, it is hilarious.

I would hate to live in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is great because it cannot be taken seriously (does the Luxor hotel replace traveling to the pyramids?). However, exporting the self-aware, ironic architecture of the strip to other cities, as Robert Venturi suggests is a legitimate reaction to modernism, undermines the field’s ability to create meaningful solutions. Kunstler shares a similar, though heightened, opinion of Venturi, calling his architectural philosophy “simple parody, which is to say the sophomoric urge to ridicule by means of feeble imitation in the absence of an urge to create something original of real quality” (83).

Moreover, Venturi’s imitations do not solve any of the underlying issues of modernism and car culture. They actually end up embracing modernist principles because they are still based on the same “signs and boxes” architecture. Venturi’s architecture is just as inaccessible as modernist architecture, divided between people who get the joke and those who take it seriously.

On the other hand, Venturi made astute observations about the streetscape of LV (and, by extension, most of the US): the signs are more important than the architecture, and at least putting something on the façade is better than doing nothing, even if it’s painfully ironic decoration. Urban planners and architects have, in my estimation, taken themselves Too Seriously and Venturi calls them out on it. Unfortunately, though highlighting modernist problems, his work does not offer any viable or significant solutions beyond (sometimes) improving a building’s aesthetic characteristics.

Robert Venturi’s Learning From Las Vegas has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. While, 40 years ago, it was boxes with signs, it is now the epitome of the postmodernist architecture movement that he helped create. Unquestionably fun, but the new landscape no more livable than the modernist’s.

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