Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

Their insight and analysis, reasoned back through the history of style and symbolism and forward to the recognition of a new kind of building that responds directly to speed, mobility, the superhighway and changing life styles, is the kind of art history and theory that is rarely produced. The rapid evolution of modern architecture from Le Corbusier to Brazil to Miami to the roadside motel in a brief 40-year span, with all the behavioral esthetics involved, is something neither architect nor historian has deigned to notice….
– Ada Louise Huxtable, The New York TImes
Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of common people and less immodest in their erections of heroic,
self-aggrandizing monuments.

This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed,
a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectureal work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm’s work.