Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film

Learning from Las Vegas, published in 1972 by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, marks the turn in architectural theory from modern to post-modern. Martino Stierli explores the significance of this controversial publication by situating it in the artistic, architectural, and urbanist discourse of the 1960s and ’70s, and by evaluating the book’s enduring influence on visual studies and architectural research. Stierli provides an original, in-depth analysis of the postmodern image of the city and the representation of urban form in visual media, graphics, and typography.

Referencing cinematic visualization, the authors of Learning from Las Vegas documented a sprawling postwar American city from a moving car. Stierli examines this methodology against the background of contemporary pop and conceptual art, including the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore. Using both text and image, Stierli assesses the broad intellectual impact of this architectural manifesto and explains why the lessons from Learning from Las Vegas remain relevant today.