99% Invisible - 302- Lessons from Las Vegas

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

To this day, architects tend to turn their noses up at Las Vegas, or simply dismiss it as irrelevant to serious design theory. But as Denise Scott Brown discovered in the mid-1960s, there is so much to learn from Las Vegas about how to make architecture that speaks to people and not just to architects. Lessons from Las Vegas

This is 99% indiscipline. I'm Roman Mars. On the University of Pennsylvania campus, there's this gorgeous old library, which is the School of Design's library of Fine Arts and Architecture. It was designed by architect Frank Fernos. It looks like a red brick and terracotta palace.

Producer Avery Trouffleman. It's got these leaded glass windows and this very elaborate roof articulated with lots of pointy ornaments and a two-story rotunda reading room. According to its website, it is a seminal library design that expresses function while merging the imagery of a cathedral and railroad station. It could be the set for any number of scenes in Harry Potter. It's a national historic landmark. It was completed in 1890.

Now you may know the furnace library at Penn. It's a wonderful 19th century building. This is Denise Scott Brown, who studied urban planning at Penn, and then taught there. And at my first faculty meeting, they were considering whether the architecture school should support the plan to demolish the Fairness Library. This was in 1960 when architects were very into tearing down old buildings.

No one would dream of touching it now, but then I was a rebel in saying that and there was a big debate and the dean was on the other side. He wanted it to modest. It was more like modernist would do, you see. In 1960, architects thought we should be getting rid of old, frilly architecture and constructing new modern, efficient buildings of glass and steel and concrete. Denise, on the other hand, was kind of over-modernism. Not that she didn't like glass and steel and concrete. She liked the buildings themselves. She was just getting tired of the philosophies behind modernism. Not that she didn't like glass and steel and concrete. She liked the buildings themselves. She was just getting tired of the philosophies behind modernism. She was

tired of architects imposing their sleek utopian visions on people without first asking people what they wanted. It was a stupid innocence to say we don't have to listen to people. They don't know what they want. We can tell them what they ought to want and we will be so good for them." And so in her first ever faculty meeting, Denise took a stand. Imagine her in her late 20s with red hair and an accent shaped by a childhood in South Africa and an education in London. She battled the dean to convince the rest of the faculty that this old library should be saved. That there's something to observing and appreciating the architecture that's already around us.

And she won them over. The whole faculty finally agreed with me, but not before a lot of argument. And after all of that, this young man came up to me and he said, I agreed with everything you said. And my name's Robert Venturi. And I said, well, why didn't you say something then? Robert Venturi, another young faculty member, didn't want to admit it at the meeting. It wasn't cool to be into extravagant old buildings then.

And Venturi was already kind of an outsider. He was struggling, and as the people there were saying, well, he shouldn't be there, he's not like us, he likes history, he didn't go to Harvard. Well, he went to Princeton, but he wasn't from a fancy family. And yes, he was really into historical architecture. And in Dinescott Brown, he found a kindred spirit. They began to share ideas and research. They were both very into mannerism, which is a late renaissance style of architecture that has a lot of complex decoration and exaggerated visual tricks, not unlike the furnace

library. It's elaborate and fun. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi worked clearly on the same page. They taught courses in conjunction with each other. From 1960 to 65, I ran one theory's course and he ran the other, and we planned them together. A colleague at Penn was so bold as to suggest, Denise, you should marry Robert Venturi. But it wasn't like that. Denise was actually a young widow at the time. She had lost her husband in a car crash pretty recently. She wasn't interested in Venturi that way.

At least not yet. We were good friends. Don't forget I had lost her husband. I was a very sad person. Denise did, however, want to take her friend, Robert Venturi, to a very special place. A place she considered the anti-modernism. A place that most of her colleagues in architecture and urban planning looked at with disdain. Las Vegas.

Fabulous. Las Vegas. I'm going to have to have to have a Las Vegas trip. All the scenes. See you. It's on sale. The whole scene. Vegas. And what happens in Vegas never really stays there. Together, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi would find lessons in Las Vegas that would spur a new chapter in architecture. To this day, architects tend to turn their nose up at Las Vegas. Las Vegas is still a very controversial topic among architects who typically dismiss the city.

This is Stefan Al, a practicing architect and author of the book The Strip. Las Vegas and the architecture of the American Dream. Every time I tell my colleagues, I study Las Vegas, I get a few frowns from architecture perspective. It's a city that's known for neon, a city known for kind of decoration, a city known for kitsch, and it's exactly the the opposite of what conventionally trained architects would like. But people love Vegas. Last year there was about 45 million people

that visited Las Vegas and that was 10 million more than the city of Paris. To be clear here, we're not talking about downtown Las Vegas. We're talking about the Las Vegas strip, a long stretch of road flanked by casinos. Yeah, so a lot of people don't know that the strip is actually not built in the city of Las Vegas is actually just outside, outside of city limits. And as a result, the developers are not as much restricted by

city zoning laws or city council and they have more leeway, so to say. Which is why the Vegas strip is never one static thing. It goes through radical changes almost every decade since the whole stretch of the strip is geared entirely to what will bring in the most tourists. It's designed for what's popular at a given time, so it will make as much money as possible. As soon as one of their buildings is no longer profitable or as soon as they realize they can actually build a more profitable building, then it's worth for them to implode the previous building and build something new. And this is how Vegas has always been. Constantly remaking itself, depending on what tourists want.

It's designed and redesigned over and over again, for its visitors. The very first casino hotel complex on the strip was called El Rancho Vegas, and it had a western theme. Literally part of the advertising was bring your western boots and your western outfits and you could wear your hats. In the 1940s, western movies were popular, and the western theme made gambling seem a little more patriotic and rugged,, you know, it's what Cowboys did. So you gotta have gambling in a wild west town, a real authentic wild west town. There were never ever any Cowboys in Las Vegas,

and so from the very beginning, Las Vegas architecture was what you could call fake. And then in the 1950s, as the fake Western Fad got tired out, they traded it in for fake mid-century suburban glamour. It really turned gambling into a suburban vacation. There were all these glamorous bungalows with kidney-shaped pools, but they all looked more or less the same. So then came the signs, starting with the Stardust Hotel in Casino.

The Stardust was the first big horizontal sign, really big, over 200 feet long. It looked like a giant explosion. And bear in mind this was also a period in which we see the space race start to begin. The Stardust upped the anti-armic competition between the hotels on the strip. More and more massive hotels popped up with bigger and bigger signs. These were all signs that were animated, and it was a really sophisticated technology that went into these structures. It was only because the competition was so intense and it was so much a stake.

By the 1960s, the Las Vegas strip was a cacophony of competing neon. All these huge jarring signs almost calling out over each other. And that's what the strip looked like when Denise Scott Brown first encountered it. I had a cold chiver up my spine. And I said, is this love or is this hate? I said, I don't know. I said, photograph it anyway before it goes." She first visited Vegas in 1965, after she had left Penn to take a job at Berkeley.

Unlike the modernists who would ignore a messy place like Las Vegas, Denise found herself curious about it. Given her background in urbanism and planning, she was interested in observing the habits and patterns of people. Las Vegas was a place people voted for with their feet. They went there in droves. They really showed they liked it. They even spent money to be in it. The 1960s ship was the exact opposite of what modern architects thought the world should look like. It was loud, garish, and dazzling. It was full-blown populism. And this is what Denise loved about the strip.

She knew she had to show Robert Venturi. Bob was the only person I invited to Las Vegas because he was the only one interested. And then he had just adored it. In 1966, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi spent four days in Las Vegas, just marveling at it. When Bob and I went to Las Vegas and had this wonderful time together,

and suddenly he became a much more relaxed human being. We took photographs, we drove the strip, we had music on, we stopped it in in the desert and we took pictures of each other and look at the joy and the on the faces of those pictures and you see what's happening you can google pictures of Denise and Robert grinning on the strip and yeah you can really see it we fell in love after five years of working together it happened in four days in Vegas. We were in a bar, and suddenly we held hands. That's about all that happened.

And then we began to get more and more fond of each other. After a little back and forth, the knee-scot-brown eventually moved back to the east coast. And then one day in a taxi, I just said to him, will you marry me? And he said said yes, and yes, and yes. Robert Venturi in Denise Scott Brown got married in 1967. And together, they went to teach at Yale. But even though she was on the other side of the country, Denise wasn't done with Las Vegas, not in the least.

In her teaching, Denise had taken great pains to include the elements of observation. And what better spot to observe than the strip? It was the epitome of sprawl, of loud advertisements, of shopping centers. It was American culture on steroids. The extreme case is usually a pure case. I think if you look at scientific study, it's often done that way. Let's get the most extreme version and then from that, we can know what the principles were, look for them in other places. She and Robert Venturi resolved to bring their students to the strip so they could see

it themselves. Venturi and Scott Brown planned a 12-week-long studio studying Las Vegas for 13 students. 10 days of this course would actually be spent on the strip itself. We were all put up at the star dust. Scott Brown and Venturi got comped rooms for them and all the students who took full advantage of the freedom they had off campus. We didn't notice when we went into their rooms, the smell of marijuana, because I just didn't know that smell. Out in the field, under Denise and Robert's eye, the students did a lot of watching and took many, many photographs. Some of which were taken from reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes' helicopter. He made available on our use of one of his helicopters.

That was very useful and we got very good pictures. And with Denise's help, the students finagled their way into the grand opening gala of the circus, circus casino. And they had got themselves dressed up. They went to the thrift shop in Las Vegas. In the midst of all the fun, the students were still really engaged with the labor of truly looking at a place. The students observed traffic patterns,

conducted interviews, and made maps and diagrams. Basically, all the things architecture students would normally do to observe Athens or Rome. But like this time they were sitting and drawing sketches of parking lots. We had a set of topics. Many of them were patterns of distribution, like where are churches in Las Vegas compared with New Haven, where are redding chapels, people with a distribution map. Denise compared the strip to a bizarre or a

marketplace but built on a scale for cars. The market is a foot market and you see the actual goods in the window of the store and you smell them when you arrive in the market. But on the strip instead of the sights and smells of the items for sale or the merchants hollering and peddling goods there are signs that call out and beckon to you. What's the anatomy of a big Las Vegas sign? It has its high reader, its low reader. How does that really, in relation to the small sign,

well, all of them put on the site? How do they draw you in, where do you see them from? And in observing the strip, and the way cars and people navigate it, they found that Las Vegas worked. The signs served their purpose. The strip was navigable. It functioned in the midst of its apparent chaos.

Like there would be an Arabian-themed sign for an Arabian-themed casino, and venues advertised the evening's performers in big lights. Everything was spelled out very clearly in a way that was appealing to people. And so Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown took all the maps and notes and observations that they and the students had collected. And together, with their teaching assistant and co-author Stephen Eisenhower, they put it all in a book.

A book published in 1972 called Learning from Las Vegas. What happens next? Everyone reads that book. This is architecture and design critic Alexander Lang, and she says learning from Las Vegas challenged architects to take the architecture of Vegas, what they call the architecture of the American highway, seriously. And that it too has a structure, and it too has lessons that we can learn from. And so let's stop being snobby and only kind of talking about architecture within architecture,

and look at what's actually out there in the world and what we can learn from it. It's not just saying, hey Vegas is cool, it's saying here's a whole approach to the world that we actually live in. And truly, everyone studying architecture read this book. Why did it catch on? Because people were searching for a way out of the dead end, the dead end of modernism, and this book written by kind of the coolest kids in architecture seemed like it might be that way out. By 1980, learning from Las Vegas becomes

a text assigned in every architecture school. And that is a huge deal because it means American architects can't ignore the built environment that's all around them. Although Venturi got most of the credit. Look, I never get the famous all. It's Robert Venturi and what's that wife doing hanging in there? But learning from Las Vegas derives from Denise's experience on the strip, which she then invited Venturi along for. Not to mention Denise's background in observation and planning and her belief that spaces should be designed with people in mind.

The idea that architecture needed to say something to the maximum number of people, not just to people who were educated in the themes of architecture. Venturians got brown loved the historical elements of architecture that anyone could recognize. And so they say, you know what? People love houses with gables.

People like their banks to have columns up front. So let's do that. Columns can signify that a building is important since they're associated with banks and government buildings. A triangular roof means that the building is a house. And if those elements help people to understand the building, architects should just go ahead and add them. Denise Unrobert puts some of these ideas into practice in their own work. One of the more extreme examples is their design for the Children's Museum of Houston. They put these oversized Greek columns in the front, which signal that it's a museum, but

because it's a children's museum, the columns are bright, canary, yellow. And the columns hold up a massive sign that says, Museum, in big red letters. You don't have to wonder if you've made it to the right spot. It's pretty clear. And they did this for adult museums too. For example, in Seattle Art Museum there's a sign on the top of the building. It just says, S-A-M, Seattle Art Museum. It is very big.

I mean, not all their buildings had giant overt signs on them, but the point is Robert Venturian to Nyscot Brown were not afraid of signs. They were not afraid of color, and they were not afraid of historical motifs. Their work in their architecture and writing was about making sure buildings were accessible and understandable to as many people as possible. In this morphed into one of the most controversial movements in architecture. Postmodernism. Postmodernism was a way for buildings to be communicative, deeply meaningful, and fun. Although the problem is a lot of designers just focused on the fun part. So some postmodern

architecture takes the kind of the jazzyness of Vegas, takes the colors, takes the neon, and that becomes one form of postmodernism. A lot of architects and designers were just like, oh cool, now we can use neon and bright colors and big signs and slap on historical styles and details without any meaning. Just for the fun of it. In other words, it became part of the aesthetics of the 80s. Bright colors, bold shapes. This is what a lot of people mean by an aesthetic of postmodernism.

Just kind of goofy without substance. It goes in all of these different directions, and I think Tini's got brown really hates some of those directions because they don't have the interpretive quality that they brought to their version of postmodernism. And as postmodernism became sillier and sillier, it strayed further and further away from what Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi were originally trying to do. It became hard for clients to see how deeply intentional and thoughtful their work was. You know, it wasn't like when Triumph to another after they wrote that book by any means. We'd probably had more work if we hadn't done all this.

Their books, their buildings, championing places like the Las Vegas strip. They were definitely times when they didn't have them any clients and it was very difficult for them to get work. Ultimately, postmodernism's popularity was short-lived. So what happened with postmodernism's popularity was short-lived. So what happened with postmodernism is it really did not last very long

as an architectural movement. It has basically a 10-year, approximately 10-year heyday, you can say, kind of early 80s to early 90s. And then it just goes really out of fashion. The clients sort of revert back to wanting things that look modernist and architecture reverts back to its previous form. People go back to wanting faceless buildings in shades of gray and black, made of glass

and steel. And if people want it, Las Vegas will deliver it. Yeah, so that's the big irony of it all. Architect and strip historian Stefan Alligan. As they publish the book, learning from Las Vegas and Las Vegas becomes known as the birthplace of postmodernism and celebrating signage and moving away from boring modernism. This is actually when Las Vegas turns to the opposite as ever Vegas was ahead of the curve. The strip had already started to revert to corporate modernism, even before learning from

Las Vegas was published. In 1967, the state of Nevada passes the Corporate Gaming Act, which allows big corporations and hotel chains to own and operate casinos. So, Frances De Hilton became a casino operator on the Las Vegas strip, and they built following their own aesthetic, which was a corporate modernism, and it was precisely this style of architecture that Denise Cobran and Robert Venturi lamented. That's a big irony. But of course, this isn't the end of the story. The strip, after all, is always reinventing itself, responding to what consumers want.

The big glassy towers continue to rise until, in 1989, Steve Winn stuck a giant erupting volcano in front of the Mirage Hotel. This brings in the Disneyland era, when Casinos started to build crazy, expensive attractions. Treasure Island, which had a big sinking pirate ship, the big Cinderella castle Excalibur, and then came the next phase of the ship. Let's call it vacation land. Fake Venice with fake canals and gondoliers who sing to you, fake Paris with a fake Eiffel Tower.

And then, in the new millennium, Vegas welcomed a batch of new casinos, designed by big-name prestigious architects. They're trying to appeal to millennials by making Vegas look like a cutting-edge city. These drinks are like $16. And soon, without a doubt, the strip will shape shift again. This is all just to say, the Vegas strip is in such a constant state of flux and renewal. It only barely resembles the city that was chronicled in learning from Las Vegas. But it almost doesn't matter that Vegas has changed, or that postmodernism as an architectural

movement was a short one. As Denise Scott Brown herself has often said, learning from Las Vegas is not about Las Vegas. Here's critic Alexander Lang again. The point is to use the tools, you know, really the critical tools, like they are writing as critics of the American landscape to apply to your own landscape, your own situation. Learning from Las Vegas has helped architects open their minds, reserve judgment, and learn from the everyday built environment around them.

If you do want to observe the changing ever-shifting state of the American landscape, there's still no better place to see it than the Las Vegas strip. Every time I go to Las Vegas, I see something new. And if you want to stay ahead of the curve as an architect, it's good every now and then to visit Las Vegas. Denise Scott Brown went back to Vegas a few more times and witnessed many of these changes,

but it's been a while now. I haven't been there recently. And what I learned from the Disneyland, the theme park era was that they were very talented in doing that. But you know, we have always turned on designing a casino. That was not the point for us. But also no one asked us. Easy to turn it down. We do not ask. That's called Sour Grapes. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi are still together. And now they live back in Philadelphia,

just a 30 minute drive away from the Red Brick Library designed by Frank Fernos. A wonderful 19th century, mannerist building. Bob and I regenerated this, amazed it into the architecture library. No one would dream of touching it now. In 1986, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown worked on the master plan for the restoration

of the furnace library, the very building that brought their lives and their ideas together. It's everyone's favorite architecture game, Duck or Decorated Shed. Right after this. We're back in the studio with Avery Trophman with a little addendum to the learning from Las Vegas story. There's this one really famous takeaway from learning from Las Vegas that we didn't cover in the story because it kind of eclipses the rest of the book. Architects tend to say, you had only one finding, the doc and the decorated shit.

We had 10, 15 or 20 findings and they haven't rid the stuff well enough and learned how to use it. I'm one of those people that loves the concept of the duck versus the decorated shed just because it has a great name. It has a great name. So, I mean, we can cut this out if we need to, but should I give a shot of what I think it is and maybe correct me? Sure, yeah. So what's the duck in the decorated shed, Robert? Okay, so there are two types of buildings.

There's a duck, which is a building with the form that represents the thing that's inside of it. And then there's the decorated shed, which is essentially a box with a sign on it. More or less. More or less, but it gets, it gets, so that is what it is in theory, but then as you apply it to the real world, if you look around looking for ducks and decorated sheds, it gets kind of complicated.

Yeah, every time I teach the duck and the decorated shed, I have to go and reread it. And I probably should have gone and reread it. It's strangely difficult. So, design critic, Alexandra Lang is going to help us out. A decorated shed is a building that is a box that could contain anything. And it has a sign out front that indicates what happens inside. So yeah, pretty much a decorated shed. You got it.

A decorated shed is pretty much what it sounds like. It's a simple, it's not necessarily a box, but it is a simple and generic building with a sign or a decoration on it, like the Stardust Hotel, which Denise was staying in. That was a facade, a mile long, just blazing with neon. And we walked round the back, and Bob said, the back of this building is far less decorated than what a group has ever dreamed of, and we call that the shed.

So decorated sheds are actually quite common, if you think of like a big box store, if it goes out of business and another business moves in, they just change the sign and it completely functions. And I think the interesting thing about learning from Las Vegas and Scott Brown and Venturi's work is that what they're basically saying is like, decorated sheds are not a bad thing. That is one of the main points learning from Las Vegas is trying to prove that signs are a really efficient way for

a building to communicate. So we were getting this model of the shed all over the place, but I was walking down in front of the art and architecture building in New Haven, and I looked up and I said, you know, it's got no decoration, but the whole thing is a piece of decoration, which brings us to the duck. The duck. So that's the idea of the whole building being a decoration. Do you know why it's called the duck?

I don't. So it's actually, there's this famous building on the side of the road in Long Island, literally shaped like a duck. And it sold duck. And it sold duck eggs. It's niche. Well, of course, it, and it sold duck eggs. It's niche. Well, of course, it sells a lot of duck, and it doesn't really matter what the shape is

inside. There's room for all the activity that goes on there, even if it's shaped like a duck. There aren't a lot of buildings shaped like the very thing they're selling. That's pretty rare. There's one outside of where I grew up, which is one of the reasons why I know this, and it resonated with me. What is it? So, I lived for a stretch of my childhood in Newark, Ohio.

And outside Newark, Ohio is the, starts with an L-basket company. I don't know what it's called. Oh, I know that building. They sold baskets and they had a building shaped like a big picnic basket. It's like one of the rare like pure forms of duck. That's so cool. But then the interesting thing is like, Frank Gary buildings can technically be ducks.

Frank Gary is like Mr. Duck. Because those are statement buildings that are not decorated per se, like they don't have ornaments on them, but they are built out as an entire piece of decoration in and of themselves, like with Gary, he has these crazy, curved metal exteriors that force the interiors to accommodate it.

So it's kind of counterintuitive because you would be inclined to think, well, modern buildings are sheds because they're very minimalist. But yeah, there's this whole argument to be made that a lot of modernist architecture was very preoccupied with making ducks. What they call the heroic and original architects,

people like Paul Rudolph and the brutalists, made a building that looked like, you know, did all kinds of crazy things to try to express what it did inside, but actually often made, you know, rooms that were unusable or balconies that nobody would ever hang out on. But that's not to say that ducks are bad.

And some buildings should be ducks, you know? Or some buildings should have duck-like parts of them because the inside is less important than the outside. The little airport buildings that need something on them to make them show from the air, it would help them do their jobs better, but they better have a big red checkerboard pattern. So no play will fly into them. For a while, when we went to give a lecture,

it usually would be someone dressed like a duck on the stage with us. So which was a nice sign of kind of something happening. So I guess you were pretty much right. But what do you think, anything surprising in there? Well, it widened my scope of what a duck is. I can see why even if you're really smart like Alexander Lang, who's way smarter about architecture than me or anyone in the building, that you would kind of have to look it up.

Like is maybe the Apple campus a duck? I mean, I think there's a case to be made that it's a duck. Are there any other sort of edge cases that we could talk about? I'm trying to think, well, I'm also thinking of like other hotels on the Las Vegas strip, you know? Right. Like, some of them really walk that line. I'm thinking particularly of like New York New York Hotel,

which has this, it looks like the skyline of Manhattan. And I can't tell if that is like a front on a bunch of buildings. You know, it's hard to tell what is the sign and what is the shape of the building, especially when you get to the Vegas strip. It's funny that Vegas ends up being the best form of examples of both. Yeah. Wow.

Learning from Las Vegas. There we go. Cool. Thanks. I looked it up afterwards, and it is the Longer Burger Basket Building that's in New Org Ohio, and it does, and it looks like a giant picnic basket. It is no longer owned by the Lungenberger company, but the current plans are to preserve it

in all of its magnificent darkness. 99% of Israel was produced this week by Avery Trouffleman, Mix and Tech Production by Sharif Yusuf, Music by Sean Rial. Delaney Hall is the senior editor, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald,

Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Adam Nathaniel Furman with fact checking by Graham Haysha. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California. We are part of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners, just like you. You can find 99% of visible and

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