Las Vegas Studio. Bilder aus dem Archiv von Robert Venturi und Denise Scott Brown
Curators: Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli
Museum im Bellpark, Kriens
23 November 2008 to 8 March 2009
Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main 27 March to 5 May 2009 Seen in Kriens, November 2008
PDF Version
This may well be the right moment for a fresh look at Learning from Las Vegas, the urban research from the 1960s by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour into an environment that was typically “popular” and “non-designed,” developed almost solely for commercial reasons.This reassessment is timely not only because we seem to find ourselves in the midst of a general reorientation towards the conceptual legacy of this era, but also because of the enduring—and enduringly touchy—relationship our society seems to have with mass culture.Such a reevaluation was first undertaken by Martino Stierli in his dissertation Ins Bild gerückt (Zurich: ETH, 2007) about Learning from Las Vegas; the investigation has now been continued in the exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, curated by Stierli (an art historian at the Universität Basel) and Hilar Stadler (director of the Museum im Bellpark, Kriens).
The Las Vegas Studio exhibition displayed original material from the architects’ research in Las Vegas. Exceptionally, it presented almost one hundred photographs, along with various films and some astonishing mock-ups of pages for the original book, from the Venturi and Scott Brown archives that—in 1972—were not selected for publication. The selection ofphotographs chosen for this exhibition by Peter Fischli and the curators, however, does not deal so much with the misses, but instead gives an interesting insight backstage into the creation of this seminal document of late twentieth-century architecture. Thus the exhibition can be understood as a kind of “Making of…Learning from Las Vegas.”
What comes to the fore is, first, the specific working method of the researchers and second the (in the book) less explicit, but at least as interesting, “other” aspirations the authors had towards their research object. The apparent pleasure in studying Las Vegas becomes visible in the snapshots of the researchers themselves at work, and also in the lively and almost physical way in which the Las Vegas artifacts of mass culture are represented here. At the same time this physicality reveals the real focus of these photographs: the sign as a material thing. This is best conveyed, for instance, in the photographs of a cemetery of billboards, in which the (now-“dead”) billboards become vividly alive once again as constructions of communication.Some images feature the atelier of a Las Vegas billboard designer: here we see a young Bob Venturi contemplating in awe some beautiful models of a “Flamingo” sign and, in another photo, studying a precise model of the Frontier hotel and casino with a “Frontier” billboard next to it. Most interesting are those photographs that show the signs as design itself: compositions of lines and colors, as well as technical constructions. A beautiful example is the view of the brightly pink “Flamingo” sign taken from above so as to show the construction of the different layers of flower petals and the depth between these.
The exhibition presented this overwhelming body of photographs as works of art, beautifully displayed in poster-size prints, glazed and framed. Yet more than works of art meant for a broad public, these images are the result of very serious and sensitive investigation by architect-scholars, who appreciated these artifacts as study material for their craft: the making of an architecture of signs and communication for a modern mass society. Whoever is interested in this craft—arguably a major factor in today’s appreciation of the architectural legacy of the mid-twentieth century—should have seen this exhibition.
A fine book accompanies the exhibition, which not only includes excellent reproductions of the photographs, but also features a well-written and well-documented essay about the Las Vegas studio by Martino Stierli, a rich essay by Stanislaus von Moos, a leading scholar of the work of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, and last but not least an entertaining conversation between Peter Fischli, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas regarding the photographs. This conversation between the Swiss artist, the Swiss art historian and the Dutch architect touches upon some interesting and sensitive points. Why were Venturi and Scott Brown interested in commercial culture? What are we to think of that choice? And what to think of this all in today’s context? Koolhaas argues that “commercial American Pop culture” was then a “completely plausible” source, because, he claims, “back then, it was the most coherent, consistent and creative bubble you could possibly imagine.”
Karin Theunissen Technische Universiteit Delft
Publication related to the exhibition:
Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli, editors. Las Vegas Studio. Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.With a conversation between Peter Fischli, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and essays by Stanislaus von Moos and Martino Stierli. Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, 2008, 196 pp., 175 illus., CHF 49.90 / € 33 / $ 49 / £ 25, English edition: ISBN 978-3-85881-717-4; Deutsche Ausgabe: ISBN 978-3-85881-229-2
