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Learning from Las Vegas
by Robert Venturi, Denise
Scott Brown and Steven Izenour marked the end of
modernism in architecture and planning as effec-
tively as the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing
blocks in that same year. Venturi, Scott Brown and
Izenour made implicit common cause with Melvin
Webber’s ‘Nonplace Urban Realm’ of the early 1960s
to the extent they considered traditional urban forms
no longer relevant, but, most shockingly, they
declared that modernist concepts of architectural style
and form were similarly obsolete. Instead of mod-
ernist doctrine that placed emphasis on the sculptural
form and constructional integrity of buildings,
Venturi and his colleagues proposed an architecture
that was based much more on signs and symbolic
communication. They threw down the gauntlet to a
profession still mesmerized by European modernism
by placing the products of American popular culture
on a par with Corbusian aesthetics.
Developed from a 1968 essay, 
A Significance for
A&P Parking Lots
, the message of 
Learning from Las
Vegas
was an exhortation to architects not to reject
the popular culture of their time, but to elevate it to a
subject worthy of serious study, just as pop artists had
challenged the aesthetic values of high modernism a
decade earlier. The subtext of the argument was that
the space of the commercial strip, or of highway travel
in general, was a more valid architectural and cultural
experience for Americans than the traditional,
enclosed space of European plazas. For Venturi and
his co-authors, the most relevant works of architec-
ture along the highway were the commercial signs
rather than buildings. If architecture was about com-
munication of meaning to the general public, then
the symbolism of the large signs was more effective
than modernist abstract aesthetics.
To further this message, Venturi and Scott Brown
organized an exhibition in Washington DC, in 1976,
entitled ‘Signs of Life: symbols in the American City,’
which examined popular symbolism in the family
house, the American Main Street (almost defunct
by that time), and the commercial suburban strip.
Architects and planners didn’t have to like Venturi
and Scott Brown’s thesis, but one fact was undeniable:
for the first time in over thirty years, architectural the-
ory was re-embracing the suburbs. 
Learning from Las
Vegas
validated the process of learning from existing
and commonplace landscapes; indeed the authors
considered this intellectual reversion a praiseworthy
and revolutionary act (Venturi et al., 1972).
For thirty years or so, the study of the symbolic
iconography of the American strip has continued
to provide fodder for esoteric academic studies at
schools and colleges of architecture, but has done little
to improve the physical environment. Reclassifying
something that was ugly and inefficient as visually
rich and significant didn’t alter the fact that suburbia
was developing in a manner that was detrimental to
the city, its citizens, and its environment. However,
Venturi’s subversive text breached the intellectual dam
of modernism in a crucial way, and other possibilities
for design began to open up. If it was valid to study
the existing landscape, then was it possible that older
American landscapes, those of the traditional town,
might also hold some lessons?
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CHAPTER THREE
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TRADITIONAL URBANISM
55
There was one other positive urban result from
American architects’ fascination with the brash road-
side vernacular of the Strip and its signs and symbolic
meanings. This emphasis on semiotics captured the
imagination of a profession keen to reconnect with
public sentiment, and initially led to several years of
superficial façadism in postmodern architecture.
Architects slathered classical or populist images on
the façades of their buildings – to little lasting effect –
but these designs did at least lay the groundwork for
a crucial lesson. The renewed emphasis on the design
of building façades independent from the building’s
plan meant that it was possible once again to regard
the external walls of buildings as 
urban
elements,
responsive to conditions in the exterior public realm.
To understand the revolutionary implications of
this seemingly modest change, we have to remember
that modernist buildings didn’t have façades. This
was a word banned from design studio in the 1950s
and 1960s for its decadent, historicist overtones.
Instead, the building’s external walls were designed as
elevations, raising the plan in three dimensions with
the expectation that the disposition of windows,
doors and other elements of the wall would reflect
the needs of the ground plan with functional
precision. As reasonable as this may have been on one
level, this focus on a building’s appearance as
predominantly the expression of its internal func-
tions meant that external factors such as adjacent
buildings and the urban context had little or no role
to play in the building’s aesthetics. As an extension of
this attitude, as we noted in Chapter 1, architects in
the 1950s and 1960s had dismissed the study of con-
text itself as having much value, and existing build-
ings were often viewed as inconsequential and in the
way, as Figure 3.1 indicates.
Architects slowly relearned the lesson of history that
external walls need not merely enclose and express the
building’s internal functions, but could independently
shape and modulate external space. This shift allowed
architects to go further, and study the traditional role
of buildings as definers of public space instead of sim-
ply objects in space. From here it was only a short step
to designing new buildings that specifically responded
to their context – a setting that included adjacent
buildings, the public spaces of the city, and the pat-
terns of human activity within those spaces.
Within ten years of architectural modernism’s intel-
lectual decline, this fledgling interest in contextualism
connected in the USA with a growing interest in the
traditional vernacular architecture and urbanism of
American towns and cities. This nexus received its
earliest expression by the vacation community of
Seaside in the Florida panhandle, designed by Andres
Duany and his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in
1981–82 (see Figure 1.11). Seaside featured modern