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Learning from Las Vegas, Revised Edition The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

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ISBN-10: 026272006X

ISBN-13: 9780262720069

Edition: 2nd 1977 (Revised)

Authors: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour

List price: $32.95
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Description:

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 architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller…    
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Book details

List price: $32.95
Edition: 2nd
Copyright year: 1977
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 6/15/1977
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 208
Size: 6.02" wide x 8.98" long x 0.63" tall
Weight: 0.858
Language: English

Robert Venturi is principal in charge of design in the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Pritzker Prize and the Centennial Medal of the American Academy in Rome and, with Denise Scott Brown, the National Medal of Art and the Vincent J. Scully Prize of the National Building Museum. He has taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

Denise Scott Brown is principal in charge of urban and campus planning and design in the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the ACSA-AIA Topaz Medallion for Architecture Education and the Chicago Architecture Award. She has taught at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Steven Izenour (1940-2001) was coauthor of Learning from Las Vegas (MIT Press, 1977) and a principal in the Philadelphia firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc (VSBA). His most noted projects at VSBA include Philadelphia's Basco showroom, the George D. Widener Memorial Treehouse at the Philadelphia Zoo, the Camden Children's Garden, and the house he designed for his parents in Stony Creek, Connecticut.

Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Revised Edition
A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas
A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas
Commercial Values and Commercial Methods
Billboards Are Almost All Right
Architecture as Space
Architecture as Symbol
Symbol in Space before Form in Space: Las Vegas as a Communication System
The Architecture of Persuasion
Vast Space in the Historical Tradition and at the A&P
From Rome to Las Vegas
Maps of Las Vegas
Main Street and the Strip
System and Order on the Strip
Change and Permanence on the Strip
The Architecture of the Strip
The Interior Oasis
Las Vegas Lighting
Architectural Monumentality and the Big Low Space
Las Vegas Styles
Las Vegas Signs
Inclusion and the Difficult Order
Image of Las Vegas: Inclusion and Allusion in Architecture
Studio Notes
Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed
Some Definitions Using The Comparative Method
The Duck and the Decorated Shed
Decoration on the Shed
Explicit and Implicit Associations
Heroic and Original, or Ugly and Ordinary
Ornament: Signs and Symbols, Denotation and Connotation, Heraldry and Physiognomy, Meaning and Expression
Is Boring Architecture Interesting?
Historical And Other Precedents: Towards An Old Architecture
Historical Symbolism and Modern Architecture
The Cathedral as Duck and Shed
Symbolic Evolution in Las Vegas
The Renaissance and the Decorated Shed
Nineteenth-Century Eclecticism
Modern Ornament
Ornament and Interior Space
The Las Vegas Strip
Urban Sprawl and the Megastructure
Theories Of Ugly And Ordinary And Related And Contrary Theories
Origins and Further Definition of Ugly and Ordinary
Ugly and Ordinary as Symbol and Style
Against Ducks, or Ugly and Ordinary over Heroic and Original, or Think Little
Theories of Symbolism and Association in Architecture
Firmness + Commodity Does Not Equal Delight: Modern Architecture and the Industrial Vernacular
Industrial Iconography
Industrial Styling and the Cubist Model
Symbolism Unadmitted
Form La Tourette to Neiman-Marcus
Slavish Formalism and Articulated Expressionism
Articulation as Ornament
Space as God
Megastructures and Design Control
Misplaced Technological Zeal
Which Technological Revolution?
Preindustrial Imagery for a Postindustrial Era
From La Tourette to Levittown
Silent-White-Majority Architecture
Social Architecture and Symbolism
High-Design Architecture
Summary
Appendix: On Design Review Boards And Fine Arts Commissions
Bibliography
Credits